The actor talks about dropping trou for the R-rated satire, jumping through a prosthetic penis, and messing around on a giant cocaine trampoline.
Canadian actor Brett Geddes reached a potentially awkward moment on his first date with his now-girlfriend. They were walking through the area surrounding the Parliament buildings in his home city of Ottawa when a standard question came about: “What do you do for work?” When your job is on a show like The Boys, the answer is never dull.
He remembers telling her, “Oh yeah, I was naked on set. I was jumping into this penis.” He adds, “I was just so excited to tell her about it.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t a deal-breaker and they went on to have many more dates, but the actor admits his life has been dominated by dick ever since filming his scene-stealing role of the size-shrinking Termite for The Boys season 3 back in 2020. “A friend of mine messaged me a little while ago,” Geddes recalls. “He was like, ‘I’ve never seen someone post so many giant penises on their [Instagram] Stories in my entire life.'”
Much had been made about “Herogasm,” the adaptation of the supe orgy in the original The Boys comics, in the weeks leading up to the third season premiere. Audiences were blissfully unaware of the sequence that would come to rival that R-rated debauchery right in the opening episode, which dropped on Amazon’s Prime Video platform on June 3.
Geddes debuted as Termite, a supe with the ability to alter his size just like Marvel’s Ant-Man or DC’s Atom. Our first impression of the guy comes during a house party where the supe dry humps Barbie in front of Ken in a child’s dollhouse for the amusement of his guests. He then goes in the backroom to snort cocaine with his boyfriend, played by actor Jarrett Siddall. “I want you inside me,” his beau says. Since this is The Boys, he doesn’t mean what you think he means.
Termite proceeds to shrink down small enough so he can dive through the hole of his lover’s penis, which is flopped out on the table, and stimulate his partner from the inside. An accidental sneeze caused by all the drugs tickling his nostrils forces Termite to revert back to normal size, exploding his boyfriend from the inside.
To pull this off, the behind-the-scenes crew built an 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long prosthetic penis for Geddes to propel through. The sequence, which was shot over a little more than a week, was Geddes first scene when he arrived on set — and his first time getting naked in this way.
Brett Geddes poses for the camera in his birthday suit on the set of ‘The Boys’ season 3. COURTESY OF BRETT GEDDES
Geddes had originally auditioned for The Boys back in season 2, but didn’t land any of the parts. He put himself forth for the bit role of a man fleeing a robbery who’s killed by Homelander (Antony Starr) in an alley as the supe then copulates with Stormfront (Aya Cash) on his dead body. He also auditioned for the man who, warped by Stormfront’s fear-mongering, fatally shoots a convenience store clerk, thinking he’s an illegal supe. A bigger part Geddes tried out for was Blue Hawk, the cop supe who gets in trouble for killing an unarmed Black man.
His time finally came with Termite. “This was just a normal audition for me,” Geddes says of the anything-but-normal gig. “I got a self-tape request. The only difference was that there was a height requirement for it, which was like 5-foot-8 to 5-foot-10 in order to jump into the penis.”
The first phase of the audition consisted of three lines of dialogue, but it was mostly Geddes dry humping the air on a self-tape. (Geddes mentions he would later dry hump the life-size Barbie for the dollhouse bit so much that he wore down the skin of the prop: “They showed me a picture of it. I actually skinned it right down. They had to put more on.”) The second phase was more emotional: capturing Termite’s screams at Frenchie, Tomer Capone’s character, who walks in during the aftermath of the penis explosion.
“The only other thing about that one,” Geddes notes of that part of the audition, “was that they wanted to make sure everyone knew like, ‘We’re not sure exactly what we’re gonna show right now, but odds are you are going to be naked. Are you comfortable with that?'”
Geddes, admittedly, was a bit apprehensive for the nudity when he arrived on location in Canada. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the production had issues with flying Capone into the country, so those scenes with Geddes kept getting postponed. They decided to throw Geddes right into the fire with the giant penis.
“Nothing can prepare you for walking on set and seeing an 11-foot penis that they’ve built for you,” he says, once again laughing at how absurd he sounds describing his work life.
The penis was much more realistic than he was expecting from the scripts. The crew lubed up the giant Johnson for easy… um, access. A camera was fitted inside the genitalia set on a pulley system that could move and track Geddes as he popped through the urethral opening. “The other insane thing was that they had projectors on each side shooting a projection of the blood going through it,” Geddes remembers.