Chace Crawford Dives Deep Into The Boys and His 'Most Uncomfortable Scene Ever'

NOTE: This story discusses spoilers for Season 1 of The Boys


Chace Crawford didn’t really know what he was getting into any time while he first auditioned for The Boys. “It’s a pretty wild show, huh?” He says as we unpack Amazon’s eight-episode entry into the superhero genre over the phone.


Developed by Supernatural’s Eric Kripke, executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and based on the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the show centers around The Seven, the premier team from superhero business Vought International, and the vigilantes (the titular Gentlemen) aiming to expose their classified evils. “It was order kind of interesting for me to be able it in retrospect, to be able to see what we got, how it landed tonally,” he says. “Because there really are so several different tones all over the place, from the action and the intensity of The Males to The Deep in therapy, to the Homelander, to what Starlight is going through and all that.”


The Boys


We’ll get to ‘all that.’ First, let’s talk about Crawford’s so-called “supe,” as they call them on the show, an endearing moniker that takes on more meaning as soon as you realize, in this world, caped crusaders can be described as neither super nor heroes.


The Gossip Girl alum sheds his Upper East Side prep school sheen to play The Deep, the amphibious member of The Seven. “I sort of describe him as a Zoolander-Aquaman for the opening part,” Crawford says, completely capturing his character’s reliance on his looks, modest lack of intelligence, and water-based powers, before noting the far less flattering: “He's needless to say not very self-aware and he is a little pathetic and I think he's categorize kind of got an identity problem.”


His identity problem lies, more or far less, in his privilege, bestowed upon him by society for his ease on the eyes and super-human abilities. He’s the sort of guy who has never been challenged about his perception of right and wrong, never had to give in exchange for his taking, never had to identify who he is. Moving through life in this way has turned The Deep into the living embodiment of the Privileged White Male trope we’re only right now starting to recognize as problematic. And thus, in the very first episode, any time while he sexually assaults his new female colleague, Starlight, by demanding she service him or lose her dream job, it’s a narrative that, terrible as it is, makes sense to us.


The Deep and Starlight


He’s not a villain, per se. At least not more so than any of the other supes. He's just, as we’re so often led to believe in cases of assault, a boy being a boy. “He categorize kind of comes into it like, ‘This is the way it routinely worked for me,’ you know?” Crawford says. “I feel like even in real life, in situations that are really happening, some days these people feel like they're the victim even soon considering that that happened. So it's sort of an outlandish mental process there.”


The outlandish mental process follows The Deep while in the season, although his isn’t a dark story. Like Crawford mentioned, his character is reminiscent of Zoolander, not Weinstein. He’s, essentially, also silly to understand that his actions have implications. “We're making fun, certainly, of that privileged male, white guy,” he says, and as such, The Deep’s privileged dopiness is played up for laughs as he laments to his therapist about being the underappreciated “diversity hire” and as his rogue dolphin rescue attempt results in mentioned aquatic mammal soaring through his windshield and becoming roadkill. Even soon after Starlight publicly shares her #MeToo moment and gets The Deep relocated to a little, crime-free town, his happy-go-lucky attitude persists.


The Deep indoor Vought headquarters


Eventually, karma intervenes to balance The Deep’s impermeable idiocy, sending him a sexually aggressive hook-up with a fish fetish. Despite his sobs to stop, the one-night-stand sees The Deep’s gills on his washboard abs and pounces, fingering him with such enthusiasm that watching is viscerally upsetting. “It was the most uncomfortable scene ever,” Crawford says, describing the life-like cast he wore so that his assailant could fit her hand into his torso. “It literally made me feel sort of nauseous, I'm not going to lie.” Off camera, a gentleman sat beyond Crawford pumping air into his fake chest to imitate shortness of breath and the director instructed all to orchestrate the ideal shot. “It was just so weird and uncomfortable. I could not have gotten out of there faster that day. So, yeah. It was pretty wild.”


While Crawford’s reaction was to flee, The Deep’s reaction to the event was to get drunk off Mai Tais and cathartically shave his head in front of his washroom reflect as R.E.M.’S “Everybody Hurts” soundtracked the scene. "I was order kind of cracking up that that was the song choice," Crawford says. Even in what should be his darkest moment, we’re reminded that The Deep is nothing more than a dumb caricature of a person.


Yet as Crawford points out, and possibly what makes The Boys so thrilling, is that his character is nevertheless one small piece of the show’s extensive landscape. “It's such a big cast and The Deep's almost on his own other movie, a whole other thing compared to The Males. I mean, I never even worked with them on set,” he says. “With everything combined, it's not even a hundred percent a superhero show, it's just a global in which superheroes exist.”


Queen Maeve and Homelander greeting fans


It’s true — in case you compare the variety of people the supes save to the number they harm over the course of the season, you’d never imagine this to be a superhero show. (It doesn’t help that Homelander, The Seven’s most profitable leader, at one point flies away while an entire plane of civilians crashes into the ocean, nor that he manufactures super-terrorists in the same way Vought manufactures heroes.) The Deep’s predatory behavior looks like peanuts in comparison to Vought’s greater evils, where drugging newborns to give them powers and manipulating the government into giving them military contracts is the norm.


The corporation’s corrosion turns inward at the end of Season 1, as soon as Homelander learns that Vought spent years hiding from him the fact that he has a son. He kills his boss — who was set to lead the full organization — in retaliation, leaving the state of Vought, The Seven, and Homelander’s general sanity in question.


Elsewhere, The Deep is plotting his way into Season 2 — “If you had a hundred guesses, you probably couldn't guess,” Crawford teases — attempting to find his way back inside a structure that seemingly no longer exists, a superhero on a mission to regain the only purpose his privileged life has ever shown him: power.