Where The Boys' Nathan Mitchell Wants To See Black Noir Go In Season 4
This post contains spoilers for "The Boys" season 3, as well as for the comics.
If you've watched the season 3 finale of "The Boys," you might be a little confused by the headline of this piece. The show killed Black Noir off, after all — pretty definitively, it seemed — so where else could they possibly go with him?
But if we know anything about the corporation behind the Seven, it's that they always like to downplay the damage the team has gone through over the years. When Translucent died back in early season 1, Vought kept it hidden from the public for months. And when Supersonic was murdered by Homelander in season 3, they passed it off as an overdose. Of all the supe deaths in the series, Black Noir is probably the easiest for Vought to downplay, because the guy wore a mask in public at all times. They can easily just put another supe under the mask and act as if nothing happened.
Sure enough, that's exactly Vought's plan in season 4 — a new character will be taking Black Noir's role. Strangely enough, the character will be played by Nathan Mitchell, the same guy who was already playing him for the first three seasons. (Noir was played by Fritzy-Klevans Destine in the scenes with his mask off.) Thanks to Noir's masked nature, "The Boys" is able to keep the same main actor for him, even as the character's canonically been replaced by another supe. But how will this new version of Noir differ from the original one?
Not quite so stoic
In an interview in January 2023, Nathan Mitchell explained, "If we were going to play and remix the character, I think that everyone's seen a very stoic version of Black Noir, so if they were going to do something new, I think it would be fun to go in the opposite direction." It makes sense to create clear differences between the two versions of the character — it doesn't just reinforce the idea that these are two different people (even if technically played by the same actor), but it also emphasizes the central appeal of Black Noir: he's a man of contrasts.
"The core of Black Noir, for me, was always the contrast. The notion of, you have this super intense killer, right, who's menacing and scary and threatening, and then like ... he talks to cartoons," said Mitchell. "He has imaginary friends, he's really soft and sensitive. And so wherever you're going with the character, I feel like it's really interesting when you can find contrast within them and with the people they are connected to."
This is a big part of why Noir became so much of a fan-favorite character in the first place, and why fans were so upset when Homelander killed him. Everyone loves a gentle giant, and Noir was a textbook example of the trope. It helps that his relationship with Homelander was surprisingly solid and sweet — there was constant drama going on between all the other members of the Seven, but up until the season 3 finale, these two always had each other's backs. It's hard not to feel a tiny bit of sympathy for Homelander at Noir's betrayal, just as it's hard not to feel bad for Noir as his imaginary cartoon friends gather around him in his final moments.
Where New Noir goes from here
The news that Black Noir is being resurrected also re-raises the possibility that the show might follow along with a storyline from the comics. In the source material, Black Noir is revealed to be a Homelander clone, except slightly more powerful. He was designed by Vought to keep Homelander in check, just in case Homelander went off the rails and stopped being useful to Vought's bottom line.
Back when I speculated about Homelander's survival odds at the beginning of season 3, I declared (perhaps prematurely) that this plot twist was no longer possible in the show: "For one thing, we now know for a fact that the show's Black Noir is not a Homelander clone." But with the original Noir dead and being replaced by a (presumably still always-masked) Noir, perhaps the show will be more faithful to the source material than it originally seemed. There's still the issue that the show's Homelander can canonically see Noir's face behind the mask — so the new Noir can't be an exact clone — but maybe this new Noir is also quietly biding his time, preparing to take down Homelander the moment Vought gives him permission.
Nathan Mitchell hasn't said anything to support this theory, of course. Instead, he mainly just emphasized his favorite part of playing the character: "I remember one of the first times I put on the suit I felt like a kid, you know, you feel like a kid. You're like 'Oh, I'm in a superhero suit, this is so cool!' Then you walk by a mirror and you're like, 'Oh, I'm f***ing terrifying. But really, just playing with the curiosity of the character and the childlike spirit and the sensitive nature, that's been really fun for me."