Filming Will Ferrell's Cameo In The Boys Was A Treacherous Day On Set

"The Boys" has always gotten a kick out of making fun of Hollywood — from its mockery of Marvel's many phases to its parody of that ridiculous "Imagine" celebrity singalong in the first few weeks of COVID-19. As such, it felt fitting when season 4 tackled white savior sports films, this time with Will Ferrell playing a white coach who saves the troubled Black A-Train from a life of drugs.

"I'm not giving off too much of a 'Blind Side' vibe, right?" Ferrell asks, only for the shallow director to reply, "As if that's a bad thing?" The 2009 Sandra Bullock-led film has gotten a lot of flak over the years for the way it blatantly altered real events to make a condescending movie about a perfect white family rescuing a helpless Black kid from a life of crime. (That's probably not how the writers wanted the film to come across but, well, that's how it came across.) Although the culture has largely turned on "The Blind Side" these days, "The Boys" takes place in a universe where these sorts of narratives are still widely beloved, received uncritically by almost everyone.

It was fun watching Ferrell give the white savior movie his own satirical spin, but his involvement was decided fairly late in the game. "At the time, Jessica Chou wrote in the script, 'huge Hollywood star,'" showrunner Eric Kripke explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "That's what it was plugged in as, and we just needed to find the right person." 

The "right person" could've been anyone, from the recurring Seth Rogan to Charlize Theron. Ferrell only came on board because Kripke had a few pleasant interactions with him, although it's not clear if they were pleasant enough to justify the whole filming experience.

"At the time, I had just had a meeting with Will and his producing partner Carolina [Barlow]," Kripke recalled. "We ended up texting, and he's the nicest guy, and so I just reached out to him and said, 'Would you be interested in flying out to Toronto for 36 hours and doing this role for us?' He thought it was funny and agreed to do it, which was amazing."

The only issue was that it was a long 36 hours. While Toronto, Canada has become a popular city to film movies and shows in thanks to a whole bunch of economic incentives, there's always the problem of its weather for half of the year — cold, gray and wet. "There were horrible shooting conditions that day, just freezing sideways rain," Kripke explained. "I felt so bad, because he was outside all day and he just could not have been kinder or more gracious."

This wasn't the first time "The Boys" had to deal with some Toronto-specific complications. In 2019, they were supposed to film the fantasy sequence where Homelander lasers to death an entire crowd of Victorian Neuman supporters, but they had to find a different location for it at the city's request. This was because the street the scene was supposed to be filmed at, Mel Lastman Square, was close to the site of an actual terrorist attack in 2018 that killed 10 people and injured six others. 

"I flipped out," Toronto City Councilor John Filion explained at the time. "There are people who work in this building, who went out onto Yonge St. to try to help the van attack victims — many of them are still traumatized. And think about the families and loved ones of those victims [...] I made some phone calls and that second portion was cancelled."

Of course, overall Toronto's proven itself a great city for "The Boys" to film in, as shown by the series' choice to stay in the city for five seasons (and even more for its spinoffs). Sure, it may be obvious to New Yorkers that the show's characters aren't living in the real New York, but that's a problem TV series and films have struggled with since long before "The Boys" came along.