The Boys’s Susan Heyward Knows Season 4 Was “Very Confrontational to the Audience”

The post The Boys’s Susan Heyward Knows Season 4 Was “Very Confrontational to the Audience” appeared first on Consequence .

[ Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of The Boys . ]

Susan Heyward knows that the fourth season of Prime Video’s The Boys is much more “on the nose.” As Sage, the smartest person in the world (don’t just say “woman”) her character is the mastermind orchestrating the political chaos that comes to a head in the Season 4 finale — giving her a front-row seat to the mayhem in place.

“It’s really intense — other seasons were a little more subtle,” she tells Consequence . But with Season 4 being much more direct with its themes, for her “it raised the stakes. It left no room for questions. I think it’s very confrontational to the audience, in ways that might not necessarily be as entertaining or as enjoyable, because it’s a bit less of an escape.”

However, she continues, “At the end of the day, I also think it presents an opportunity for us to be culpable, for us to say ‘It’s fun and games, we can laugh about it, but these things are actually happening.’ And after we finish watching, after we turn the computer off, what are we going to do about it? I think it kind of leaves that question in the lap of the audience, more than it has before.”

Heyward and I speak weeks before the season finale premieres on Prime Video, which means neither of us have any idea that the episode will premiere just days after a real-life political assassination attempt. In the aftermath, Prime Video chooses to retitle the episode (originally known as “Assassination Run”) and add a disclaimer to the beginning of the episode about the plotline similarities being “completely coincidental and unintentional.”

Still, the episode now entitled “Season 4 Finale” directly invokes the events of January 6th, 2021, with Sage’s plan coming to fruition with a newly-selected President who will happily kowtow directly to Homelander ( Antony Starr ).

Heyward was a “huge fan” of the show prior to her casting, so she knew the world and the tone in advance. “I was hungry for the sharpness of the humor, the cynicism at some points. I as a person tend to be really genuine and earnest and kind of like, ‘Let’s come together guys!’ So it was a really fun change for me to operate in a world that has to undercut any kind of deep, raw emotion like that.”

To play “the smartest person in the world,” Heyward took her cue from the show’s chaos — “because there’s so much gore and there’s so much explosive action, I felt like the way to go for me was the opposite way. There’s a certain power in stillness. There’s a certain potentiality in stillness. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. And there’s a certain kind of delayed gratification; if you can stretch that stillness out, the next moment of movement takes on more meaning.”

Most of Heyward’s scenes in Season 4 were with Starr, who she says has “such a great face, and he has such great expressions.” According to Heyward, Sage (being a genius) is well aware that “the kind of animal that Homelander is, as soon as he smells fear, it’s over.” But while the character might be fully aware of how dangerous he is, she notes that “we first found her in a place where she’s content among her books, but not particularly overjoyed with life. She doesn’t have a lot of connections to speak of, and there’s a little bit of recklessness that I think excites her. She’s not used to being surprised. She’s not used to walking on a tight rope for anyone, and it makes her feel more alive than anything.”

Thus, she continues, “there’s the animal instinct for survival, but there’s more pros in what Homelander could bring her, versus being so afraid that she misses out on that opportunity. I feel like there’s a cynicism, a lack of belief in actually anything changing that kept her from trying to do it [before]. But the protection of Homelander’s physical prowess and cultural power — I think that’s interesting to her, being the hidden person behind the scenes as much as possible.”

When it came to Sage’s final moment of triumph, Heyward says that filming the scene “was so daunting, honestly. I wanted to try a few different ways, because I didn’t want to tip the scales too much. I didn’t necessarily want to make her too zany, too lightweight, because she had such a huge win. I didn’t want to undercut the power that she accumulated. But I also wanted to see her in a way we hadn’t seen her before — celebratory, a little more open, a little more forward.”

At first, she starts describing the new dynamic between Sage and Homelander as one of equals, before correcting herself: “Not even equals — I think boss. I’m taking on the mantle of, ‘I got this, if, excuse my French, you fucking listen to me.’ So that day, we did it a few different ways.”

The Boys (Prime Video)

It helped that Kripke was directing that episode, so “he was able to say, push it this way, push it a little lighter, have a little more fun with it. I was really happy with where we landed with it. There’s a kind of a serpentine, agitated, searching shark-like thing she has going on, which I don’t think I played with earlier in the season. I think he was pushing me to let go of some of the still introspective [Sage], and have her a little more fun. So I’m hoping that that’ll extend to Season 5 too.”

Sage seems set to play a major role in the final season of The Boys , though at this stage Heyward isn’t sure what direction it will take. “I’ve gotten to pitch things [to creator Eric Kripke],” she says. “He likes to say the best idea wins. So I think my job is to stay in my little corner and stew and ask, is she an agent of chaos? Is she someone who’s just testing out chaos theory? Does she have a secret mission? Is she her own hero? I have an idea about a secret deep, hidden goal of hers that she hasn’t shared with anyone. I shared that with Eric. So I think now is the moment to just be generating ideas and let the pros do their thing.”

As for characters she’d potentially like to interact with more in the final season, she notes that “there’s something about the history of A-Train that I feel I’d love to get deeper into — the way Sage is introduced in the first episode, A-Train has a really strong opinion about her. And she goes through a lot to protect A-Train over the course of the season… I think it could be really interesting to see what that backstory might be, why he had such a strong reaction to the idea of her joining the Seven. Maybe there’s a more complicated reason she protected him as long as she did.”

No matter what, Heyward’s enjoyed getting to play someone not so heroic here. “It’s fun to not be deeply concerned with the things that often protagonists are concerned with, like being liked, or a deep sense of morality,” she says. “And it felt very freeing to have an amoral approach to her goal.”

She continues, “I don’t see her as a villain, I see her as someone who’s deeply, deeply practical, deeply, deeply realistic, and has no illusions about the nature of the people that she’s dealing with. It takes the hopeful crusader hero aspect out, and then it allows the audience to put on top of her all of their emotions: She’s a villain, she’s terrible, she’s crazy, she’s badass, she’s awesome.”

The Boys is streaming now on Prime Video .

The Boys’s Susan Heyward Knows Season 4 Was “Very Confrontational to the Audience”
Liz Shannon Miller