The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke on Show's Eerie Trump Timeliness

Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: the boys

The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke on Show's Eerie Trump Timeliness

The Boys creator Eric Kripke on balancing positive themes of hope in series's darkness, the eerie Trump/Homelander coincidences, and more.

Published Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:37:08 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• Eric Kripke says The Boys Season 5 pushes Homelander to his most unhinged extreme yet: wanting to be seen as a god.
• Kripke calls The Boys’ Trump-era parallels eerie, joking real-world headlines keep outrunning the show’s satire.
• Despite The Boys’ darkness, Kripke says the final season is driven by hope, resilience, and people saving themselves.
• Kripke reflects on The Boys capturing the cultural zeitgeist through authoritarianism, celebrity, social media, and fascism.

It feels like a broken record for The Boys creator Eric Kripke that he's making a serious satire when he adapted the Garth Ennis Dynamite Comic to the small screen for five seasons. Now that he's approaching the finish line, the most outlandish things he's conceived have taken on a surreal "life imitating art," including the latest twist on how Homelander (Antony Starr) now wants the public to see him as a god that also happens to align with the way the 47th President sees himself these days. Speaking at the Deadline Contenders TV, the Supernatural mastermind was joined by supervising stunt coordinator and director John Koyama and stars Jessie T. Usher (A-Train) and Karen Fukuhara (Kimiko) to discuss the fifth and final season.

The Boys Creator Eric Kripke on Social Media Coincidence of Homelander and Trump

When it came to planning the final season, Kripke was trying to devise ways Homelander can one up himself from previous seasons but he didn't plan on Donald Trump to share himself as Jesus healing someone in robes via AI (despite his claim he thought it made him look like a doctor), "The five seasons has been the slow descent into madness for Homelander, and this season we thought, 'Well, let's take him the craziest he could possibly get,' which is he decided that he wants to be a god," he said. "I thought that was the craziest thing that could ever potentially happen, until Trump released an image of himself as God 48 hours before we aired. Can I just say, they're making it really hard to do satire. Slow down for one fucking minute and let us be more absurd than the world? That would be great."

Kripke also tried to balance positive themes in the process, "On the hero side, people say the show is so dark, but the theme we were most interested in was hope," he said. "How do you hold on to hope in the darkest possible times, which I think is quite relatable, and how do you keep getting up every time you're knocked down? And some big hero isn't swooping out of the sky to save you, so we all have to get busy saving ourselves. What does that look like?"

Even as a show like The Simpsons has constantly been accused of predicting the future, the precision and timing of world events make the coincidence all the more baffling. "We didn't necessarily plan on it, but for [the show] to reflect the world in the period that we're living in so specifically — this intersection of authoritarianism and celebrity and social media and fascism and just this swirl that we were able to hit at just the right time — you spend your whole career trying to chase, trying to hit the zeitgeist, and it's going to be really hard to do it again," Kripke said. "That's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I am grateful and appreciate it. As a matter of fact, now I have this experience where I'll read whatever is the latest horrific headline in the news every morning, but now I don't have a place to put it." The Boys, which also stars Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Erin Moriarty, Laz Alonso, Chace Crawford, Tomer Capone, Nathan Mitchell, Colby Minifie, Jensen Ackles, Cameron Crovetti, Susan Heyward, Valorie Curry, Giancarlo Esposito, and Daveed Diggs, streams Wednesdays on Prime Video.

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