The Boys VFX Supe Confirms The Deep Didn’t Eat a Real Octopus

The first three episodes of The Boys are full of one shocking moment after the next, including one particularly grim sequence when The Deep (Chace Crawford) is forced to eat his friend Timothy to prove his allegiance to Antony Starr’s Homelander. You see, Timothy is one of The Deep’s sea-faring friends, and Homelander conned the hero into eating him in front of his wife and other employees at Vought. 

Once some concern spread online over the moment, The Boys visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet took to Instagram to confirm that yes, that entire moment is CGI.  In fact, Crawford only got a plush to interact with during the moment.

“One of our crowning accomplishments, I think, was this fully CG guy,” Fleet said in his post. “We had a rubber puppet and some tools for ref on set, but he’s 100% not real! Feels good to not endanger or harm any actual animals at all and is a great use of VFX. Courtesy of @mpc_film in London. Who were top notch to work with!”

Starr even commented on Fleet’s post, adding “I was there on the day. No idea this would look this great in the end. Amazing stuff.”

When we spoke with Fleet last year, the filmmaker applauded Prime Video’s willingness to allow visual effects and special effects (practical) to work together instead of making most things CGI.

“I’m not bullshitting because a lot of times people say that and it’s not true. It’s 100% true. We worked so well together that it’s one of the reasons I think the show looks the way it does is that I’m able to, with a lot of sequences, have it be 75% practical and 25% visual effects or like 50/50. Not like 10% practical, 90% visual effects,” he said at the time.

Fleet added, “What people I think outside of the industry may not realize is that so much of it comes down to time and the challenge for special effects in this day and age is it takes a lot of time on set. It was so easy on a show to say, we’re just going to do a visual effect and just push the hot potato down the line so they can make their day on set, but on this show, we don’t do that. We make sure to fight for them to have the time and do it that way.”

The first three episodes of The Boys Season 3 are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes are scheduled for release every Friday.

What have you thought about the show’s latest season so far? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter!