The Deep's Octopus Eating Scene In The Boys Was Uncomfortably Realistic
One of the many oddities of "The Boys" is the way that any character, no matter how terrible, suddenly transforms into an audience surrogate the moment they're trapped in the room with Homelander. A-Train is a selfish, murdering jerk, for instance, but it's hard not to relate to him as Homelander starts making fun of his weight and there's nothing A-Train can do about it. Ashley is a power-hungry corporate stooge, but when she develops a hair-yanking habit from the sheer stress of working with Homelander, we have no trouble understanding why. When Homelander shatters the ear-drums of an innocent, Daredevil-inspired supe, Ashley's horrified expression perfectly matches how we feel.
Such is the case with Chace Crawford's The Deep, a character who could've been a main villain in any other show. Introduced as a rapist and further characterized as a shallow loser with an unsettling fish fetish, Deep briefly stops being quite such a hateable character when Homelander is tormenting him. Outside of maybe Stormfront, nobody deserves to be treated the way Homelander treats people.
This is made most clear in "The Boys" season 3's "Barbary Coast," where Homelander (who is feeling more sadistic than usual) decides to force The Deep to eat an octopus. But it's not just any octopus; it's Timothy, an Octopus that the fish-talking, fish-loving Deep has grown particularly attached to. "He's begging for his life," The Deep says. "He has kids." But Homelander insists, and The Deep's wife Cassandra urges him to go along. "EAT THE F***ING OCTOPUS," she texts him, and The Deep realizes he has no choice but to go along with it. And so begins the grossest, most agonizing 45 seconds in a show that's already filled with gross-out sequences.
It wasn't just gross for the audience
Unfortunately for Chace Crawford, the scene wasn't entirely done with CGI. "They made it all feel very real," he explained to Entertainment Weekly last year. "I think Colby [Minifie, who plays Ashley] is vegan, so they made everything [with Timothy] like vegan somehow. Some of the legs of Timothy were mochi ... there's like three different parts to it, but the main biting down part was like syrup and something else... It was disgusting but uh, yeah it was palatable, it was okay."
Crawford joked about the taste in another interview, a TV Guide segment where the cast says their heartfelt goodbyes to poor, sweet Timothy. "Didn't taste very good," he said, but he mostly just speculated about The Deep's relationship with the beloved octopus. "[Timothy] was a good listener," he said, in character as The Deep. "We'd have long, long chats about our different upbringings, because we were very different creatures, but, um, poor Timothy. Yeah, he's gone too soon."
Honestly, given all the stories we've heard about method acting and directors tricking their actors for more authentic reactions, we're just happy the showrunners didn't make Crawford eat an actual, living octopus. After all, Jeremy Strong actually drank that revolting "meal for a king" in the "Succession" finale, and Will Ferrell really did eat some of Buddy's gross, syrupy treats in "Elf."
The recipe for Timothy
"The Boys" VFX supervisor Stephen Fleet gave Corridor Crew a general explanation of how this scene was made. "We had a full rubber Timothy and we used him as reference," he explained. "So it starts with, like, we had the rubber thing. Then like, 'What's he going to put in his mouth?' So we ended up creating like a [rubber] head. Then when he's sucking [the tentacles] up, what's he gonna do to suck them up? So our props team took over at that point."
Fleet described the food Crawford had to eat with a bit more detail than the actor managed. "A food specialist created a vegan tentacle, [which] looks like a gummy worm that he could suck up. It's the right size — not the right texture, we had to skin over it — but it gave him something tangible, because you want those chopsticks to grab onto something." He added that the "ink is real." They created an "ink balloon," that Crawford did a "lot of tests and rehearsals with."
At a certain point, it starts to feel like having the actor eat an actual octopus would be easier than doing all this, which might be why PETA praised the show for how they went about this scene. But for Fleet, all these extra steps felt necessary. "I was like, 'This is not easy, this is not easy work, so we need to get as much real stuff as we can into the arena here.'"
Rest in peace, sweet Timothy
Of course, the grossness of Timothy's demise isn't just about literal taste and texture of what Crawford was eating, or the inky ooze dripping out of his mouth. It's horrifing because there's an intense friendship between The Deep and Timothy. Not only that, but there's also weird sexual thing going on between them. In a bizarre scene where The Deep is having sex with his cult-approved wife Cassandra, it becomes clear that Deep is more interested in Timothy, who is watching from the fish tank behind the bed. The Deep's deep passion for cephalapods is confirmed later on in season 3; he hooks up with one during Herogasm, and later tries to convince Cassandra to have a threesome with himself and an octopus called Ambrosia.
But hey, we're not here to judge. In fact, it's almost kind of sweet how The Deep clearly views fish as fellow people and treats them as worthy of kindness and dignity. We say "almost" because, despite The Deep's good intentions with them, he keeps accidentally getting them killed in brutal, humiliating ways. He gets a lobster murdered after promising he'll keep it safe, he gets a dolphin run over by a truck, and he lets poor Lucy the whale get impaled by a speedboat.
Timothy is the natural escalation of this trend, as The Deep doesn't just accidentally kill him; he is forced to actively chew and swallow a creature that he genuinely considers to be a friend, a confidant, and a lover. Basically, The Deep is being forced to eat a fellow person. More so than the physical sensation of forcing a living, writhing octopus down The Deep's throat, it's the loss of a loved one that's truly uncomfortable. Rest in peace, Timothy. As Victoria Neuman actress Claudia Doumit poetically declared: "You only had eight tentacles, but we wish you had nine lives."