The Boys Star Jack Quaid On Hughie's New Naked Powers [Interview]

If there is one absolute truth in the world of "The Boys," it's that nothing good comes from having superpowers. Sure, we got a pretty big hint of that when the very first episode started with A-Train just running through (and across) an innocent bystander and blowing her to pieces, but the show has done nothing to discredit this theory. If anything, it has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on the misery of superpowers, along with doubling down on the disturbing, gross, and hilarious depravity that comes from them.

This makes the titular boys resorting to fighting fire with fire a fun yet tragic development in this third season. We already spoke with Karl Urban on the cost of bad decisions and Butcher taking Temp V to gain superpowers. /Film also talked to Jack Quaid about Hughie's own powers, and how they lead to him being naked for a big chunk of the season.

In episode 4, Hughie gets bitten by the superhero bug, and decides to also inject himself with Temp V in order to help the boys in their attempt to find Soldier Boy and use him to kill Homelander. While Butcher's powers include super strength and laser vision, Hughie's is teleportation, but with a catch: He gets completely naked after using his powers.

"It was a lot to get used to, because it's just something that — I feel like the human brain is not equipped to really deal with situations where you have a lot of people looking at you naked, all of which are clothed and there's a camera on you," Jack Quaid told us. "That's a very vulnerable place to be in, but I just love the storytelling with it. I love the fact that Hughie finally gets super powers, but that there's this huge catch to it. I love that because it makes sense."

He continued:

"If you're teleporting across the room, your body is going to another place, but your clothes are going to fall to the floor. So I just thought it was so funny and so Hughie to have this added layer of embarrassment. And then from an emotional standpoint, I love that it's all kind of wrapped up in kind of a budding toxic masculinity for Hughie this season. And it was interesting to play sides of him that weren't all nice and weren't all chipper and weren't the best sides of him. 

I thought that was really cool to play a slightly more dynamic version of a person you've really seen be a good guy for many, many seasons."

"Jack loved getting his tackle out," Karl Urban joked. "He was a little bit nervous at first, but then once he got comfortable with it, he was swinging it around and he had a lot of fun."

"The Boys" season 3 is now streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes premiering every Friday.