Diego Peralta
The final season of The Boys allowed the brave heroes of the Prime Video hit to finally get rid of Homelander (Anthony Starr). After fighting the menacing villain for so long, Hughie (Jamie Campbell) and Butcher (Karl Urban) reached the end of their story. But before the White House battle took place, Homelander recruited a very powerful ally.
Oh Father (Daveed Diggs) was at the front of Vought’s ideological propaganda. One of the villain’s most blatant collection of lies was “Raise Him Up”. The flashy musical number asked Vought’s audience to embrace Homelander as their true lord and savior. Awards Radar had the opportunity to interview Daveed Diggs, and the actor was aware of how the song encapsulated the thesis of the series, to the point of reflecting some aspects from today’s politics.
Presentation is everything for Vought. Oh Father needed to wear an impressive costume in front of his followers, and Diggs was impressed with the adaptation’s costume design team, led by Michael Ground and Laura Jean Shannon. “The fittings for those costumes is one of the craziest things that I’ve ever done. It takes a 9-month process to build those things. The first two days of it were measurings to get the padding to look like real muscles.”
Daveed praised The Boys for depicting a political climate that thrives on misinformation. The actor believes that the hero drama’s message is quite clear: “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to anybody whose head (the message) flew over. The reason satire works is because you have to have an understanding of the thing you’re satirizing in order for it to be funny. That’s what makes it funny. That’s how it differs from slapstick. If somebody falls and slips on a banana peel, that’s funny to everyone. If somebody points out inequalities in a political system, someone has to understand and believe that there are inequalities in said political system. It’s one of the things that makes The Boys special. It’s smart enough to point fingers.”
It takes a long time to make a season of a project like The Boys. The project goes through several phases over the course of months, even years, before audiences can get a taste of the action. Daveed Diggs thought the writing for the final installment of the Prime Video adaptation was brilliant, because the scripts lined up with current events despite being written a long time before the show’s return: “When the writers started writing this season, they couldn’t have predicted that this would be the same year in which we got pictures of Trump like a yolked Jesus-figure. They’ve always been like a little bit ahead of it. I don’t think writing humor from a place of anger really works. It can come out of frustration and a sense that we are better than this. We are so much better than this. Sometimes, I think that the best way to remind people of that is to laugh at it.”
The Hamilton star hopes that the satire depicted in The Boys makes some members of the audience feel as if their believes are reflected on the screen. The super hero show knows what to make of fun, and the mockery comes from a place of understanding what people struggle with in modern day: “I hope it makes some people feel really seen. It probably makes some people uncomfortable. It probably gives some people release. And then also, specifically with “Raise Him Up”, it’s just a really good song. My two-year-old loves that song, and he has no idea what’s going on. (laughs). He requests it all the time. It checks a lot of boxes.”
Oh Father met his demise when Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) placed a ball gag in front of him, blocking his own power in order to make the priest’s head blow up. Daveed revealed that there were no alternate takes for the character’s bitter end. Oh Father was always meant to go out by ball gag: “Not that I knew of. By the first time I read the script, that was already in it. I thought it was hilarious.”
The villains of The Boys use money, propaganda and political influence to get away with anything. Diggs reminds audiences that these are the questions the satire is asking. The Prime Video hit stood out when in comparison to other hero stories due to the complex political context it was willing to tackle over the course of five seasons: “The questions this season is asking is: Why are we giving nations, corporations and elected officials the right to human beings? That actually doesn’t make sense. Things should be by human beings, and for human beings. To help us organize ourselves. Not people. The thing about the idea of borders is that we made it up.”
“Raise Him Up” is the showstopping musical number that featured Oh Father presenting Homelander’s latest public relations image to an entire planet. “Music in general is always really good at that. But I think the tradition of musical satire goes back to the Vaudeville days in this country. What musical numbers are really good at is getting the emotional payoff for free. Music already makes you feel something. The song is going to feel fun and exciting. The music does all of that work for you. Because it’s doing all of that work, it’s easier for you to throw in more highly conceptual stuff.”
In the end, Oh Father was just the secondary antagonist The Boys needed. A dark personification of the tools Homelander needed to get into the White House with the support of the people. Hughie, Butcher, and the rest of the gang had a hard time dealing with the priest. In the end, Oh Father became one of the most memorable aspects from the last installments of the series.
All seasons of The Boys are now streaming on Prime Video. This interview was edited due to length and clarity purposes.
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