The Boys Season 5: [Spoiler] Actor Explains How They Really Feel About Being Killed Off [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for "The Boys" Season 5, Episode 6, "Though The Heavens Fall."

"The Boys" has just two episodes left, and the body count has finally started piling up. After the death of Firecracker (Valorie Curry) in Episode 5, Episode 6 features another member of the Seven murdered: the masked Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell), who is stabbed by his former friend and podcast co-host The Deep (Chace Crawford).

In fact, Black Noir has already died once in the Season 3 finale, when Homelander (Antony Starr) gutted him for keeping secrets. But the show got around this; in-universe, the Vought corporation covered up Black Noir's death by, bringing in a Supe actor to be a new Noir in Season 4. This also allowed "The Boys" to keep Nathan Mitchell on ... but that stay of execution is over.

/Film spoke with Mitchell about how he learned Noir II would be dying, and getting killed off just before the end of the show:

"[Series creator Eric Kripke] called me and had a talk on the phone. He was like, 'Hey man, it's been a ride and it's been amazing, but it's time to end.' And I understood. As much as I would have loved to stay on to the end, we got a lot of stuff to wrap up, we have a lot of story to tell, and this was the right place for Noir to go. And so while I was sad, I was still just thankful and grateful that I've been on the show for this long and we've had such an amazing ride and I've gotten to play these two great characters."

Asked about which version of Noir was more fun to play, Mitchell called them "apples and oranges," highlighting the silent coolness of the original but the funny expressiveness of the second.

The Deep is one of the most pathetic and loathsome characters on "The Boys" — stupid, incompetent, servile to people with more power than him but a bully to those with less, incapable of self-reflection, and always unable to take any opportunity to change. (It's a testament to Chace Crawford's acting that he can make the character so funny, something that's kept The Deep a favorite of "The Boys" writers.) It might feel like salt in a wound to have your character killed by the least badass Supe around, but Nathan Mitchell told /Film that it made sense The Deep was the one to kill Noir II.

"Over the course of Season 4, Noir and Deep become brothers and The Deep also becomes a mentor to Noir. The Deep teaches [Noir] that violence is power, and if you want things to go your way, if you want to succeed, you have to use violence. So that's the lesson he gets," Mitchell recounted.

Noir is taught that lesson again in Season 5's "One-Shots" when The Deep murders Adam Bourke (PJ Byrne), who was directing a theatre show Noir was starring in. As revenge, Noir destroys an oil pipeline that Deep had previously endorsed, killing untold amounts of marine life and turning The Deep's fishy friends against him. When Deep learns what Noir did, he kills him.

"We see why violence as power and violence as a solution doesn't work well in the end," Mitchell explained. "So it's really like this rise and fall, but [the Deep and Noir II] have been together since the beginning of Season 4, so it's appropriate that they are the cause of each other's demise."

"The Boys" is streaming on Prime Video.