The Boys’ Eric Kripke Reveals How They Cast That A-Lister For The A-Train Movie In Season 4
Spoilers for the first few episodes of The Boys Season 4 ahead! If you still need to catch up, you can watch all five episodes with an Amazon Prime subscription, and make sure to catch new episodes every Thursday as part of the 2024 TV schedule.
If you've been watching The Boys Season 4, then you saw the first three episodes when they dropped earlier in June 2024. One of them, "Life Among the Septics," featured A-Train filming a movie for Vought (as is tradition), but you might have been surprised to see a specific celebrity pop up –- Will Ferrell as a fictionalized version of himself and Eric Kripke talked to CinemaBlend about how that great cameo came to be.
Through the five episodes of The Boys so far, there have been moments that have been harrowing, exciting, or more. We could talk about that hospital scene with Hughie Sr. or that wild clone fight moment (I will never get it out of my memory), but to me, the moment that made me laugh the most was when Will Ferrell showed up as a fictionalized version of himself.
It happens in the second episode, where he is portraying Richard Brinkerhoff (a character from Gen V) in a movie that A-Train is starring in, and it is so sudden and out of nowhere but hysterical at the same time. CinemaBlend's Sean O'Connell had the chance to discuss with The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke how this cameo even happened – and Kripke said that he was already "chatting" with the Anchorman actor prior to the cameo, so it naturally came up:
I was actually chatting with Will Ferrell around that time about potentially writing a screenplay for him. And so we were in contact. We had meetings and a couple emails, and when that role came out and we … I think the first draft, it was written as just 'a huge Hollywood star.' I was like, 'That would be really funny if Will wanted to do that. You know, going for that Oscar bait movie that Jim Carrey would go for.' So I just reached out to him and (asked), 'You want to come to Toronto for 30 hours and just bang this thing out?' And he was so gracious and lovely.
The Boys showrunner commented that Ferrell was just "happy and glad" to be filming that day, even if the weather was absolutely horrible:
It was a horrible weather day, too. It was icy rain, blowing sideways throughout that whole scene. You just can't see it in the film. But it was miserable conditions, and he was just smiling and happy and glad to be there.
Will Ferrell is one of the biggest comedy stars out there. Some of Ferrell's funniest movies include Elf, Step Brothers, Anchorman, and more, but seeing him in The Boys is something that I never expected. While The Boys is ending with Season 5, could we possibly see Ferrell again? Because I'd give anything.
Some people have been complaining about The Boys Season 4, but to me, I'm enjoying the heck out of it, including this hilarious cameo – and the fact that Kripke and Ferrell were already talking beforehand makes that scene all the better.
