SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for The Boys Season 4. If you have not yet watched through the finale, proceed at your own risk!
The Boys might not be a horror series, but there is no question that it imagines an exceptionally scary world. While most superhero fiction suggests that the world is safer thanks to people with special abilities, the Prime Video series is filled with gifted “heroes” who are egotistical, megalomaniacal, and quick to violence.
That being said, at the end of Season 4, it’s hard to pick the character that is actually “the scariest.” Homelander has consistently been a true monster, but Sister Sage has emerged as a disturbing threat, and Billy Butcher has truly gone off the rails. Fans certainly have their own takes on the debate… but so do the stars of the show.
Covering The Boys press line yesterday at San Diego Comic-Con, I asked all of the various stars of the show I talked to the same question about who they see as the reigning scariest character, and they offered up a variety of opinions. Check out the video below!
As you can see, most of the votes were split between Sister Sage and Billy Butcher – who definitely upped their individual scary game in The Boys Season 4. Tomer Capone made a bit of a left field choice by namedropping The Deep (which Chace Crawford was particularly delighted to hear about), but looking ahead at The Boys Season 5, there are big reasons to be afraid of what Sister Sage and Billy Butcher might do in the future.
The Case That Sister Sage Is The Boys’ Scariest Character
Played by Susan Heyward, Sister Sage arrived on the scene in a big way in The Boys Season 4 and she left an indelible mark on the world. She is known as the smartest person on the planet, but she isn’t particularly interested is using her intelligence to solve the planet’s many, many problems. Not being a particularly big fan of humanity, she is more about doing stuff just to see if she can do it, and by the end of Season 4, what she wants to do is topple the United States government and launch martial law that is controlled by superheroes and Vought International.
She does have a notable weakness given her propensity for giving herself lobotomies that effectively shut off her advanced brain and turn her into an extreme dummy… but taking advantage of that character flaw isn’t particularly easy (the one example of it happening in Season 4 boils down to dumb luck).
The Case That Billy Butcher Is The Boys’ Scariest Character
It’s perhaps a little strange to identify Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher as a villain given that he has been a main protagonist on the series since the beginning, but eliminating him from this conversation wouldn’t be a fair way to address developments in the Season 4 finale (and clearly there are a number of Urban’s castmates who agree).
Health-wise, Billy Butcher is in a terrible place, as using Temp V has left him terminal, and one of the few people who has ever been able to keep him morally in line, Laila Robins’ Grace Mallory, is now dead (having been killed by Cameron Crovetti’s Ryan Butcher). His Id has essentially manifested as a dangerous hallucination of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe Kessler, and not only is he equipped with a horrific superpower that sees spiky tentacles shoot out of his chest, but he is also in possession of a virus that could wipe out the entire population of superheroes on Earth.
What makes Billy Butcher less scary is the fact that we know him at his core to be a good person… but after everything that he has gone through, he isn’t the same guy we’ve been rooting for since Season 1.
Given all of these scary folks expected to go toe-to-toe in a massive final confrontation, The Boys Season 5 should be a fascinating conclusion to the series. Sadly, we don’t yet know exactly when we’re going to see the next run of episodes, but all four current episodes are available to stream with a Amazon Prime subscription.
Source Agencies
