Shawn Ashmore Loved Playing ‘The Boys’ Much-Hyped Firestarter in Season 2

Welcome to The Boys, Lamplighter—hope you survive the experience! After a whole lot of buildup, fans of Amazon’s hit super show The Boys finally met Lamplighter this week. Lamplighter is the fiery former member of The Seven whose controversial exit prior to Season 1 made an impact on, well, everybody. The character was talked about a lot last season, and now we finally know who the guy is: he’s Shawn Ashmore!
The actor known for playing Iceman in the X-Men feature film franchise is now bringing the heat as part of the Boys-verse—and that’s not the only difference between the two characters. In addition to having total opposite powers, Lamplighter is just as loathed by his peers as Iceman was beloved. Getting the chance to suit up as the totally despised Lamplighter was a blast for Ashmore, as he told Decider, because it gave him a lot to play with.
“There’s so much work that was already done for me because the characters talked about and argued about [Lamplighter] throughout the first season and the second season, before we meet him,” said Ashmore. “I loved playing the character that was hated by everybody. It’s fun. What was challenging, and I also thought what was interesting about the character, is to try to change the audience and the characters’ opinions about who he is.”

It turns out that Lamplighter isn’t just a total jerk who, uh, murdered innocent children. When we fully meet him in Episode 6, “The Bloody Doors Off,” he’s working as a nurse at the Sage Grove Center, where Vought is running horrific Compound V experiments. “When we meet Lamplighter, he clearly is not in a good place. He’s not happy with what he’s had to do. He’s not happy with what he’s doing, and he’s kind of living in a really dark place because of the things that Vought has asked him to do.”

The irony of Iceman playing a Pyro-esque superhero was not lost on Ashmore. In fact, it’s almost like he was destined to play Lamplighter. “I actually initially auditioned for Eagle the Archer. There was some interest in me for that, but obviously I didn’t get that role,” said Ashmore. “When I didn’t get that, then Lamplighter came along and I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ I was like, ‘I would love to play a character that is the complete opposite to what most people see me as in the superhero genre’… And I think it’s no accident on [showrunner] Eric [Kripke]’s side, or casting, that they played into that and gave the middle finger to the traditional superhero genre thing.”
Having already been a fan of Season 1, Ashmore knew to expect the unexpected while working on The Boys—but nothing could’ve prepared him for two extremely wild moments in his first full episode. “The Love Sausage character that MM and Frenchie battle was hysterical for obvious reasons,” said Ashmore, referring to a Sage Grove patient’s massive, prehensile penis. “A gigantic, technical [effect] penis that is choking MM out. That was very funny and fun to shoot and hilarious. And again, sculpting this gigantic penis for a practical prop that comes in? I was like, this is so bizarre and so funny and so crazy.”

While Ashmore got to watch Love Sausage cause chaos from afar, he got up close and personal with another disgusting superpower: acid vomit. “I think the grossest thing that I had to do, or the hardest thing I had to do was: in the sequence where we’re trapped in the control booth, a character comes barreling in and vomiting acid on me—that was really crazy. The actor had to wear this mouth rig that would pump this—I don’t know, I can’t remember what the liquid was. but it was going all over me. It was all on him, it was dripping down his mouth, and then it would get sprayed on my face. It was just this super bizarre, weird effect to do. So that was kind of intense, but I was really happy with how it turned out in the episode. It looks really cool.”
Fortunately for Ashmore, all the intensity onscreen didn’t translate offscreen. However hated Lamplighter may be, the actor who plays him was welcomed onto the hit show with open arms.

“It’s always nerve wracking coming into a new project, a new show, when the train is already rolling,” said Ashmore. “How am I gonna fit in? Are you gonna be included? All that stuff. It’s like high school. That being said, everybody was super super open… Everybody that I get to work with was very open. [Lamplighter] was a character that they’d heard about. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, this character just shows up.’ It was like, ‘Oh, we know about this character and have been thinking about this character.’ So it was kind of fun to step onto set and have those conversations with all the existing cast members of how it’s going to play out, and this is how it’s going to work. So there was no hazing. Everybody was really welcoming. Which was always good!”
Lamplighter’s time on The Boys isn’t up just yet, either. The end of Episode 6 finds him in a whole new predicament—one that will surely continue to cause drama in Episode 7 next week. New episodes of The Boys hit Amazon every Friday.

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