CS Interview: The Boys Creator Eric Kripke Talks Music, Adapting the Comics & More

Ahead of the Season 2 premiere tomorrow on Amazon Prime Video, ComingSoon.net had the chance to chat with The Boys creator Eric Kripke about building the music for the show, the experience of adapting the comics to the small screen, and how long he thinks the show will run. You can check out the interview below!

In Season 2, The Boys are on the run from the law, hunted by the Supes, and desperately trying to regroup and fight back against Vought. In hiding, Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capon), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) try to adjust to a new normal, with Butcher (Karl Urban) nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) must navigate her place in The Seven as Homelander (Antony Starr) sets his sights on taking complete control. His power is threatened with the addition of Stormfront (Aya Cash), a social-media-savvy new Supe, who has an agenda of her own. On top of that, the Supervillain threat takes center stage and makes waves as Vought seeks to capitalize on the nation’s paranoia.

The Boys is an irreverent take on what happens when superheroes, who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as gods, abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. It’s the powerless against the super powerful as The Boys embark on a heroic quest to expose the truth about the supergroup known as “The Seven.” The show retains most of the comics (available for purchase here) boundary-pushing violence and sexuality while exploring the dark side of superhero celebrity and fame.

The series was created by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, who are responsible for another subversive comic book-inspired series, AMC’s Preacher, and Supernatural creator Eric Kripke.

Season 1 is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

ComingSoon.net: How is it building the music for the show?

Eric Kripke: I am super involved in the process. One of the things I really care about is the music in really all my shows, if you look at when I was running Supernatural and now this. It’s just a lot of long conversations with the editors and talking about the vibe that we want and then they’ll pitch me some songs, I think by this point they know to rarely pitch a song that was recorded after 1980, so they know my sweet spot.

In terms of the score, Chris Leonard’s the composer in Supernatural and a bunch of my stuff, we were college friends together, he was scoring my short films, so we have an incredible short-hand and it’s just a blast to work with him.

CS: Do you have a finite vision for The Boys or is it a little more open-ended?

Kripke: I am smart enough now to not publicly say endpoints for my series. That said, I think five years is a nice round number on this one and I can’t say I have a beat-for-beat plan. For the record, I didn’t have it on Supernatural, it grew from a comment I had once about a cocktail napkin sketch I had where I wanted it to end grew into this Beautiful Mind wall that supposedly I kept of what was happening in every episode. I had no idea, I just knew how I wanted the confrontations to climax.

I would say I know that here, I know where I want it to come down to and the final face-offs and that we’re slowly but surely, even as we’re building season three, building to those. But I don’t know the details of how we get there, like I said I literally couldn’t have been more wrong for the length of Supernatural, so I will not make any hard stance here.

CS: What has it been like for you adapting the source material while keeping your own take on it?

Kripke: It’s a really stressful process because I love the comic. I’m a huge fan of the comic and a huge fan of Garth, Garth Ennis is my favorite comic book writer by a mile. In the exact same breath, I’ll say that you cannot do a one-for-one adaptation, it wouldn’t work. They’re just different mediums, first of all, and when you try to do slavish, you end up with the Watchmen movie, where it’s just too claustrophobic for me. It’s a streaming show, we had to tell one continuous story, unlike the comics, which are pretty episodic in their nature.

Comics are a medium that are based on space and film is a medium based on time, so you just have to inherently make some differences. But that’s really, really stressful because that means you may be the person who destroys the thing you love for the world and so it’s a really stressful game of Jenga, like you’re pulling things very carefully and is this the thing that’s going to knock the whole tower over and ruin it? It’s way less stressful having to write your own stuff, I will say having done both, but the thing I say, especially when I get, ‘The comic was way better, you suck,’ my response is always, ‘The comic is its own thing and go read and love the comic, I do, but this is a different thing. This is my version of the thing and enjoy that as its own thing, because they’re not the same, one is not a direct result of the other, it’s inspired by the other.’

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)