The Boys’ Butcher now has an imaginary angel and an imaginary devil on his shoulder.
This week’s episode of the Prime Video series revealed that Butcher’s CIA officer pal Joe Kessler (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is actually the hallucinatory figment of a brain tumor caused by all the V Butcher took.
When Butcher’s dead wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten) pleaded with her husband to hold on to his humanity and not use the virus to wipe out all the supes, Kessler suddenly directed his anger at her, leading Butcher to realize that Kessler can also see Becca. Kessler explained that Butcher actually left the real Joe Kessler to die.
“I killed Ezekiel for you. I am inside you,” Kessler said. “I am you, which is why when I tell you that you want to do this, I am literally telling you that you f–king what to do this. So don’t you worry, Billy my boy, daddy’s home.”
The reveal came as a surprise to Butcher, but his portrayer Karl Urban and Morgan both knew about the twist from the start of the season.
“From the jump, it was always designed to be the devil on his shoulder first,” Kripke tells TVLine. “That was really how the character was conceived. Only then did we start talking about, ‘OK, so how can we create a character that Butcher thinks is real?’ and then we came up with the CIA agent and giving him a name of one of the characters from the books. So [Morgan] always knew, and I think that was the part he was most excited about, of really being able to become this devil and just really twist the knife on Butcher.”
Kripke also sat down with Urban ahead of Season 4 to talk about his arc and how Kessler played into it.
“It was just such a big twist and really crystallized Butcher’s struggle this year of half of him is human and half of him is monster, and he has to wrestle with that and decide which one is going to win out,” Kripke says. “I think Homelander is going through a very similar arc. I think Ryan is going through a very similar arc. They’re all wrestling with what part of them is human and what part of them is inhuman. So that was always core to it. And from the beginning, he was playing it, knowing we were heading towards this twist.”
To try to keep the element of surprise around Kessler, the creative team set up some practical rules for production.
“We wanted to be really disciplined in how we were pulling it off, so he couldn’t hand Butcher anything that was real. That was our biggest thing,” Kripke shares. “He could, like, give Butcher a hug, he could have a cup of coffee in his hand because it’s imaginary coffee, but he couldn’t hand something real to Butcher that he could pick up. That was one of the main ones. We tried to design it so that other characters like Sameer, if you look back at it, you realize that Sameer is reacting to that Butcher’s talking to nobody, but hopefully, the first time you watch it, you think he’s looking at Kessler.”
However, Kripke is aware that some viewers had already picked up on the clues and figured out the truth about Kessler ahead of this week’s episode.
“I know a lot of fans online have guessed it, and I think it’s impossible to totally shock the audience. They’re just so literate at figuring out puzzles. But hopefully, most people are surprised,” Kripke says.
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And since Kessler is essentially a part of Butcher, perhaps now it makes even more sense why Kripke previously told TVLine that he was in need of an actor who could go “toe-to-toe with Karl in terms of menace and charisma and charm and strength.”
“Immediately, I was like, ‘Oh, thank God, we have Jeffrey Dean and that he’s available,’ because he can do that, and I think their scenes together are just so electric,” he said. “They’re just these two heavyweights, and they’re both so strong, and just the way they play off each other. And immediately, they took to each other in real life, and they’re good friends now because they have such a similar energy. It was exciting to watch.”
The Boys fans, were you surprised by the Kessler twist? Hit the comments with your thoughts on the big reveal!
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