The fourth season of The Boys featured a major cameo from iconic comedian Will Ferrell, who ended up having to weather a storm during his brief time on set. A subplot in The Boys centered around the making of a very inaccurate biopic on A-Train’s life, which cast Ferrell as a stereotypical mentor to Jessie T. Usher’s character. It’s meant to parody the making of The Blind Side, and actually served as a vehicle for A-Train’s growth as a socially and morally conscious person.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke discussed how they recruited Will Ferrell and revealed the difficult process of shooting his scene. To recap, the second episode of Season 4 opens with a clip of the in-universe movie starring A-Train and his mentor, played by Ferrell. The show then cuts to the making of the scene, in which Ferrell fears it feels too much like The Blind Side but is blindly reassured by its director. To make the cameo happen, Ferrell had a 36-hour journey to fulfill, which included flying to Toronto, Canada, and spending an extended amount of time shooting his brief sequence. Kripke explained:
“At the time, I had just had a meeting with Will and his producing partner Carolina [Barlow]. We ended up texting, and he’s the nicest guy, and so I just reached out to him and said, ‘Would you be interested in flying out to Toronto for 36 hours and doing this role for us?’ He thought it was funny and agreed to do it, which was amazing.”
When the second episode goes behind the scenes of the A-Train movie, it’s quite obvious that they are filming on a wet and gloomy day. The difficult part of using the popular shooting location, Toronto, Canada, is the poor weather conditions productions often have to go through. This was no different for The Boys, which hosted Will Ferrell on an especially bad weather day. Of course, Ferrell was still “gracious” during the stormy production. Kripke revealed:
“There were horrible shooting conditions that day, just freezing sideways rain. I felt so bad, because he was outside all day and he just could not have been kinder or more gracious.”
The Boys Features a Litany of Major Actors
Will Ferrell is not the only major Hollywood actor to make an appearance in The Boys. Most recently, Tilda Swinton voiced Ambrosius, the Deep’s (Chace Crawford) aquatic love interest heavily featured in the latest season. Charlize Theron played a minor role as the villain of an in-universe superhero film featuring the Seven, titled “Dawn of the Seven.” Simon Pegg was cast as Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) father in the first season, while Ann Cusack played Donna January, the mother of Starlight (Erin Moriarty). Meanwhile, Paul Reiser made an appearance as the Legend, a former Senior Vice President for Vought International, in the third season when Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) was introduced.
With the upcoming fifth season of The Boys serving as its finale, it’s fair to assume the show has more cameos up its sleeves. Each season has upped the ante in every way possible, including even more A-list actors and familiar faces like Jeffrey Dean Morgan and X-Men actor Shawn Ashmore. Of course, the most important aspect of their roles is how they fit into the overarching narrative, a priority for Kripke. As he told Discussing Film before Season 4, when it comes to adding new actors, “The story always comes first.”
The first four seasons of
The Boys
are available to stream on Prime Video.