Showrunner Eric Kripke warns, “Walking through ‘Herogasm’ is a dangerous and sticky endeavor.”

Executive producer Eric Kripke has been thinking about “Herogasm” ever since he started work on The Boys TV series for Amazon. That was mainly because anyone he encountered who had read the highly graphic source material would dare him to adapt that moment. “I don’t like to back down from a challenge,” Kripke tells EW. “It’s really how I made all my creative choices.”

The problem was, it felt too bananas as a concept, as least at the beginning. The “Herogasm” arc in the Boys comics series, written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, depicted the world’s superheroes informing the public that they would travel to space and fight an alien threat. In actuality, they were heading to a remote island to kick off a weeklong orgy. The comic panels did not hold back on the very explicit nature of the super-powered sexcapades that went down.

“There was no way we could have sold that pitch the first season,” Kripke says. But after two successful runs, both in terms of critical reception and ratings, his team earned enough goodwill from Amazon to make it happen. This week saw it all come to fruition with season 3, episode 6, titled — you guessed it — “Herogasm.” “I would describe [Amazon’s] reaction as more like a kid who keeps asking for a cookie,” Kripke recalls. “They were like, ‘We knew that this was gonna happen sooner or later. You should just go do it.'”

Kripke and the actors involved with this sequence of The Boys walk through how this all came together — even though the cheeky showrunner warns, “Walking through ‘Herogasm’ is a dangerous and sticky endeavor.”

Planning the orgy to end all orgies

Starlight (Erin Moriarty) and MM (Laz Alonso) infiltrate Herogasm in ‘The Boys’ season 3.

Much like everything else on The Boys, the writers of the show took liberties to ensure the comic book elements of “Herogasm” fit into the context of their story. Instead of an orgy on an island, it’s an orgy at the 1970s-style Vermont mansion of the TNT Twins, siblings Tessa (Kristin Booth) and Tommy (Jack Doolan), former supe members of the team Payback.

Season 3 of The Boys marks the 70th anniversary of “Herogasm,” which was founded by Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy (so he says, at least) in 1952 with Liberty (who we know from season 2 was the previous alias of Aya Cash’s Stormfront). These days, Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) says it’s an excuse for C-list supes to get together every year and “wet their wicks.” That entails icicle dildos, telekinetic cunnilingus, the return of Love Sausage with his expandable signature appendage, and more Termite.

Kripke and director Dan Trachtenberg had already put on a scaled-down version of “Herogasm” in season 1. The scene involving Butcher (Karl Urban) walking Hughie (Jack Quaid) through a sex club for supes was very much inspired by the wildly risqué affair. “I was always like, ‘It’s too small. It’s not crazy enough,'” Kripke says of that sequence. “It’s perfect for a pilot, but we can go bigger.”

Jessica Chou, a producer on The Boys, earned her first writing credit on the show when she was tasked to pen the “Herogasm” episode. Kripke commended her for incorporating the comics into the story “hilariously,” even if it’s something Chou doesn’t feel she can ever show anyone in her family. Shooting “Herogasm” was another beast entirely.

The season 3 production, based in Toronto for several months in 2021, had to adopt strict protocols in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of that was dialed up for episode 6 with the presence of more than 40 completely naked extras performing simulated sex acts in an enclosed space over the course of five days. On top of that, Kripke confirms there were multiple intimacy coordinators to help ensure every single actor on set was behaving professionally and feeling safe in the situation.

“It’s a minefield of things that could go wrong,” he says, listing off all the various elements of the shoot. “It’s a lot in terms of producing and management.”

The cast picked up on the vibe. Ackles remembers the crew looking like they had seen ghosts when he came to shoot the Solider Boy-Homelander confrontation. “They looked like what they had seen they [couldn’t] unseen. They even said that,” the actor says. “One of our camera operators was like, ‘Man, I’ve seen some s— today!’ I’ll never forget that.” Chace Crawford recalls his arrival on set and seeing everyone chain-smoking, looking “rattled.” But if you really want to know what it’s like to film an orgy in the middle of a pandemic, Kripke will paint a clearer picture — and it involves lube and hand sanitizer.

“Dotted all over the set are these huge bottles of lube as set decoration, but also dotted around the set are huge bottles of hand sanitizer because of COVID,” he explains. “So literally every 10 minutes you would hear someone just yell ‘oh s—!’ because they thought they were sanitizing their hands, but they just got a huge gooping handful of lube.”

That happened to Erin Moriarty, the star behind Starlight.

“I was exploring the set for the first time and it was loaded with sex toys that I didn’t even know existed, sex swings, and a bed that rotates on an electrical rotation device. It just was filled with so many goodies,” Moriarty remembers of that incident. “I was walking around and touching all of these dildos and I go to use some hand sanitizer. I pressed the pump and the entire crew went, ‘No! No! No! No! No! No!’ That just symbolizes so, so much.”

Kripke wasn’t physically present on set during the shoot, but he heard stories like this from producer Paul Grellong and director Nelson Crowd. According to Grellong, as told to Kripke, day 1 of the shoot was “really novel and you’re surrounded by all these beautiful naked people.” By day 2, “they’re all naked mole rats and you just want to get outside.”