In the latest season of Prime Video’s The Boys, Antony Starr’s character Homelander, one of the antagonists of the series, declares himself to be a God.
But President Donald Trump already beat him to the punch.
In an interview with Polygon, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke reflected on a joke he was confident would come across as satire, rather than a direct reflection of the real world’s increasingly unhinged political climate.
In the third episode of The Boys’ final season, Homelander is convinced that he’s essentially about to become a God. Not long before the episode premiered, Trump shared a widely criticized AI-generated image on Truth Social that depicted him as a Jesus-like figure.
“This is the episode where Homelander decides he’s going to be God, and 48 hours before it, Trump releases an image of himself as God,” Kripke said. “A month ago, when we were talking about marketing, I was like, ‘Homelander saying he’s God is so out there. We have to be careful about how we even introduce the idea to the public because they’ll say he’s gone too far,’ and here we are. It’s just really hard to out-satire this world.”
Kripke has never been shy about criticizing or satirizing Trump, but he admitted that he’s gotten “really tired and weary” of the real world reflecting the fiction of The Boys before they’ve gotten a chance to do it themselves.
“I appreciate the marketing,” he added. “I’m just like, ‘Can you just please give us a chance to put some absurd satire out there before you prove that it’s more realistic than we ever intended?’”
Trump, who has recently been beefing with Pope Leo XIV, was criticized for sharing the AI-generated image of himself as Jesus earlier this month. He later deleted the image and denied any wrongdoing.
“I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross,” he told the press. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better. And I do make people better.”
In an interview with TV Guide earlier this month, Kripke admitted that he was “bummed out” that the fifth and final season was written before the 2024 presidential election because something in the penultimate episode “already happened” in real life.
“It sounds super naive now, but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet,’” Kripke said. “But instead, we got hit with the bullet.”
