Amazon Execs Put A Stop To The Boys' Original NSFW Idea For The Deep
It's a tale as old as it is tragic: another famous male superhero has had his bulge digitally removed in post-production. In a 2019 interview with Daily Mail Australia, Chace Crawford talked about how his infamous fish-loving character The Deep was originally supposed to have a comically large penis, one that viewers could clearly see the imprint of through his outfit. "[Showrunner Eric] Kripke was like, 'We get no notes from Amazon, but the first one we got was that [the bulge] can't f***ing happen, we've got to take that out."
Sure enough, the prosthetic was removed, and all of The Deep's scenes that were already filmed had his fake penis downsized via CGI. It's a shame though, because both Crawford and Kripke seemed to find it hilarious. "I don't think anyone got a bigger kick out of it than Eric Kripke," Chase told Entertainment Weekly. "He thought it was the funniest thing in the world."
For any fans of The Deep who are disappointed by Amazon's intrusions here, you can at last take solace in the fact that there is a calendar out there made up entirely with pictures of The Deep before Amazon decided he couldn't be too well-endowed. Recalling the shooting process for it, Crawford said, "They showed me one of the months and I'm like, 'Cool.' But then I'm flipping through and I'm like, 'Wait ... I'm in every one of these. It's just me. Well ... s***.'[...] I died laughing. It's obviously in character and it's amazingly cheesy and really funny. We really went for it."
Amazon: Cool with sexual content 99 percent of the time
Although you'd think it'd be the show's anti-corporate themes that Amazon would most have a problem with, their few concerns about the show seem to be sex-related. Season 1 featured a scene of Homelander masturbating over the New York City skyline while muttering "I can do whatever I want" over and over again, but Amazon demanded it be cut. Eric Kripke was confused by their stance on this — "I couldn't quite understand why, considering everything else we have in the show," he told ComingSoon — this was why hardcore fans cheered as Kripke managed to slip the scene into the season 2 finale instead.
As for The Deep's reduced penis, it's easy to see the reasoning behind it. His distractingly large love sausage would work just fine for a one-off joke, but less so for a character who Annie supposedly had a crush on growing up. Would Annie's mom really let her put The Deep posters on her childhood bedroom wall if those posters looked like how they did on that calendar? Probably not. The joke about The Deep's bulge would also probably get old after the first two or three times we saw it, but then he'd be stuck with it forever.
"To be clear, they've been great," Kripke said about Amazon. "That may have been the ONLY fight I lost in season 1." Sure enough, the show has a level of sexual content that most TV shows could never in a million years get away with. For example: a female supe's orgasm is so powerful that it blows a dude's head off. The season 3 premiere opens with an Ant-Man-type character accidentally expanding inside a man's urethra, and that once-cut Homelander scene probably didn't do much to give the show a cleaner reputation.
In defense of the show's crass approach
Unlike most superhero movies with their PG-13 mindset, "The Boys" has a strong morbid curiosity about how having superpowers would affect people's sex lives. It leads to a lot of gross-out humor some viewers might consider childish, but it's an approach that's far more honest (not to mention more imaginative) than most other mainstream series. "The Boys" never lets us forget that these supes are still people with sexualities, and that's gonna cause some trouble.
Meanwhile, one of the last times the Marvel Cinematic Universe did anything at all like this was the scene in 2008's "The Incredible Hulk" where Bruce has to stop having sex because it'll raise his heart rate too much. It's a detail that humanizes the character a lot by exploring an area of his life the MCU has since completely ignored. (Netflix shows notwithstanding, of course.) While later MCU movies will occasionally hint at the idea that some of these characters have had sex at some point in their lives, there's no real imagination or curiosity as to how their superpowers would come into play.
Although The Deep's edited-out penis bulge is hardly the craziest thing the show's ever done, there is something weirdly bold and thoughtful about the show's continued insistence to treat its characters, good or bad, as sexual beings. In addition to being fun, untrodden ground for a superhero story to explore, it also allows for plenty of opportunities to flesh out its characters in unique, fascinating ways. It would've been a shame if squeamishness had made "The Boys" writers pass those chances up.