Amazon's 'The Boys' Casts A Team Of Lowdown, Dirty Superheroes

Amazon's The Boys has cast a bunch of superheroes. A bunch of filthy, no-good, vile superheroes who will have their faces kicked in by a team of antiheroes dedicated to policing the super-powered people who walk among us.

Like the Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson comic before it, this new series follows "the Boys," a black-ops team dedicated to spying on, blackmailing, and even roughing up superheroes who stray out of line. And while we don't know who will be the title characters quite yet, we do know who will be playing members of The Seven, this universe's equivalent of the Justice League and the series' primary antagonists.

Deadline reports that Antony Starr, Dominique McElligott, Chace Crawford, Jessie T. Usher and Nathan Mitchell have joined the cast of The Boys, joining the previously cast Erin Moriarty. Starr will play The Homelander, a sort of mish-mash of Superman and Captain America, but far more vile and vicious. McElligott will play Queen Maeve, a jaded Wonder Woman-esque superhero. Crawford will play The Deep, a riff on Aquaman. Mitchell will play Black Noir, a martial arts expert. Usher will play A-Train, a speedster who is like The Flash if The Flash was irresponsible enough with his powers to cause gruesome collateral damage. Moriarty will play Starlight, a newbie superhero who quickly realizes that the team she idolized from afar are real dicks when they're out of the public eye.

While none of these actors are unknowns, the fact that less-famous faces are being used to round out the villains and supporting cast of of the show certainly suggests that Amazon, creator/showrunner Eric Kripke (Supernatural), and executive producers/directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Preacher, This is the End) may be looking for bigger names to play the Boys themselves. Interestingly, one of the main characters of the comic series was drawn to look like Simon Pegg, but it's unlikely that he'll actually commit to a television series (and he may have aged out of the part by now).

The Boys doesn't have a premiere date yet, but the eight-episode first season is expected to arrive in 2019. The source comic is hit-and-miss – the stuff that misses really misses, but oh, man, does the stuff that hits really hits – and I imagine this series will follow in the footsteps of Preacher, Rogen and Goldberg's other Garth Ennis comic adaptation for television, and tweak the overall story accordingly.