Parents usually support their kid’s work but Meg Ryan has a pretty good reason for not watching her son’s streaming show.
Most parents are proud of their children’s accomplishments and want to support them in their career.
But sometimes, their progeny makes it hard for them, like when their latest work is an all-out, violent TV series in which the character you play is in constant danger and covered in blood. That would make any parent hesitate.
“My mum won’t watch [the show],” The Boys star Jack Quaid said of his mother, When Harry Met Sally legend Meg Ryan.
Quaid, who was in Australia promoting The Boys’ third season, told news.com.au, “She says she watched the first season and I was like, ‘Did you see the second?’ and she’s like, ‘No’.
“And then I said, ‘Why’ and she was like, ‘You’re always in peril, it’s hard for me as a mother to see you in trouble and in peril all the time. You’re always on the verge of death’.”
Quaid, the son of Ryan and ex-husband Dennis Quaid, said he understood why his mum wasn’t a fan of this particular project involving her oldest child.
“I understand, I totally understand.”
The Boys is an anti-superhero series famed for its outlandish violence. In between its searing critiques on corporate greed and fascism, it’s busy harpooning an enormous whale with a speedboat, landing all of its riders – Quaid’s character Hughie among them – in the belly of the beast and covered in blood and viscera.
Quaid’s co-star, Chace Crawford, who plays the aquatic superhero The Deep, said his grandmother won’t watch the series while Australian actor Claudia Doumit, who joined the series as a head-exploding supe, admitted her grandmother doesn’t know the series exists.
Jessie T. Usher, who dons a suit as speedster A-Train, laughed before adding that his grandmother loves The Boys.
Perhaps it’s Karen Fukuhara who has the deepest support of her kin.
“My mum has watched it with my grandma and she texted me the other day – we’re in a group thread – and everyone was like, ‘You looked so adorable’ and blah blah blah.
“They completely skipped over all the blood and all of the nudity. It was a very wholesome text that was surprising for me to read.”
Crawford said The Boys could be a hard sell for his grandmother, especially given his character’s propensity for amorous relations with sea creatures.
Asked if there was ever a time he opened a script and just thought, “Oh no, I can’t”, Crawford said, “The octopus was pushing it”, referencing one of the many instances of cross-species seduction.
For Usher, it was the times he had his toes sucked on screen in season one. “That was uncomfortable to say the least,” he confessed. And then he joked of the producers and writers, “They do a really good job of writing it down on the page, handing it to you before you go to set and then vanishing.”
Crawford laughed and then added, in all seriousness, “[Creator Eric Kripke]’s door is always open, he’s really responsive on emails and calls, he’s always there to talk you off the ledge.”
Quaid said he doesn’t know if he has a line yet of what he won’t do on the series.
“I’m sure I’ll find it on this show eventually,” he said with a grin. “I welcome every insane thing. With The Boys, if you have any hesitation that usually means you’re doing something right. You have to follow the fear with the show.”
Of course, if The Boys was purely about shock value, about exploding heads, whale guts and toe sucking, it wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Drama Series at the Emmy Awards. It’s the other side of the series that tempers the violence.
“It’s really a character-driven show,” Doumit argued. “Everything is kind of justified, what these characters go through. It’s not just arbitrary shock.”
Usher said he really appreciated The Boys has a platform to delve into the deeper issues it engages with, such as racism, fascism or corporate corruption.
“Everyone on this show is game,” he said. “If there’s something that needs to be discussed, we’re not going to shy away from it. I feel that we are empowered.”
Quaid agreed, “I love that we’re able to do a show where we can actually comment on the world.”
He specifically named a story beat from the series’ second season in which a character played by Dawnn Lewis revealed her father, a black man, was killed by a superhero, and the episode’s timing with the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We get these scenes that are very timely, sometimes too timely. Obviously that’s a pervasive problem but it was an interesting thing to have that come out around that time. I don’t like the fact that we were that accurate, for the world’s sake. It was so terrible.
“But I do like that we have a show where we can actually voice our opinions on things, because the world is really messed up right now.
“Also, we get to drive a speedboat through a whale, so you get both those moments.”
