Blood and gore, and how to kill Seth Rogen. An excerpt from issue #62 of befores & afters magazine on s5 of The Boys.
Head explosions and other blood and gore are a significant part of season 5 of The Boys. Many of these effects were achieved with practical element shoots as a base, then replicated or enhanced with visual effects. The visual effects team used the term ‘chunkiness’ to refer to the nature of these explosions, including for the demise of Oh Father. In that case, he is killed when a titanium ball gag is placed in his mouth as he tries to blast Hughie.
“Here,” outlines visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet, “SFX supervisor Hudson Kenny and our special effects team shot a canon of blood at Jack Quaid’s face. I mean, we had to do it! It was the last time. It was written by design to get Jack Quaid shot with blood in his face because it’s been an ongoing joke since season 1 that at one point every season he’s going to get hit with blood in his face.”
“By season 5, too, Hudson and I had such a shorthand on this work,” observes Fleet. “We could sit in a room and it would be like, ‘Yeah, you going to do a blood lollipop?’ ‘Yeah, do the blood lollipop.’ ‘You want to do number two?’ ‘Yeah, number two.’ ‘No problem.’ ‘All right, cool.’ And then the director of that episode, Phil Sgriccia, he’d done 20 of them by that time, too. Our biggest conversation with that one was, what to do with this ball gag? Should M.M. hold onto it? Should we let go and fly towards Hughie? We didn’t want to kill Hughie with a metal ball gag. So we ended up having M.M. hold onto it. That then became some visual effects from DNEG to keep that there.”
Fleet also recalls a fun rehearsal involving Daveed Diggs as Oh Father for the scene. “He is so great, but new to the world. This was his first season on the show and he comes in and there’s a bunch of us technically savvy stunt people and visual effects crew—all these guys looking at him—and we’re like, ‘Okay, we’re going to need you to take this ball gag and stick it in his mouth.’ And he was just so chill about it.”
Chunkiness features in an even more illustrious way for the braining of Homelander by Butcher in the Oval Office, with VFX from DNEG. “That was very complicated,” admits Fleet. “We did a lot of iterations of it. The number one most important thing for Eric was the legibility of the brain and the scooping out of the brain and the depths inside the head. If you cover up the brain with too much blood or other viscera, it just becomes a bloody kind of mess. We had to think of it in layers. There’s the skull cap with the skull in it and the hair and the groom. Then you’ve got this effects explosion of blood that shoots out, and then that blood lands on things. Inside the head, there’s a mix of pre-existing blood pools, brain and bone. It was very complicated to art direct and get very specific.”
“I really, really love that shot where he slides down off the table after he’s been brained,” says Fleet. “DNEG did some really nice work with some slight movement and some slicking of the blood as it goes down. The trick there was to let it obviously be larger than life, something really painful, but believable and not overtly visual effects. We weren’t trying to call attention to the spectacle of the visual effects. We were trying to like celebrate the moment of what was happening and really not distract from his face and the performance.”
View this post on Instagram
More carnage occurs in a clash that involves Malchemical (Misha Collins), Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), Mister Marathon (Jared Padalecki) and Marathon’s celebrity friends, including Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Will Forte, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Craig Robinson. Marathon is duped into running into each of them, sending flesh and blood fly.
“For that sequence,” recalls Fleet, “we had a very limited amount of time and we had a location that wasn’t going to allow us to do any practical blood explosions, so it all had to be CG (El Ranchito). Normally, it’d be a big collaboration with SFX and prosthetics. We always want special effects to blow up some kind of blood element for us. We’re always asking for it.”
Rogen’s gory moment, in particular, sees Soldier Boy fling him into the path of Marathon, causing massive blood and body splatter, and then Rogen’s upper half resting on the floor. “I put Seth in green pants for that,” shares Fleet. “I did not really need to put Seth Rogen in green tights for that sequence, but I thought it’d be super funny to put him in green tights. So I said we had to do it. Oops. But he was pro. He’s done this before.”
“One of the coolest things about the Seth Rogen sequence was stunts,” continues Fleet. “We were in this mansion, it’s not a set. You can’t drill holes in the walls for wires. There were two stunt people on either side with a V of wires to the stunt guy and they just literally lifted him up off the ground by hand and they had him spin around by hand. It was crazy. Then Seth Rogen is already on the ground, we were able to put sort of a false floor underneath him and they drizzled a little bit of practical blood, which gave us a great reference, but ultimately we had to put in his guts and the lower half of his body.”
