‘The Boys’: Jensen Ackles And Eric Kripke Tease Soldier Boy’s “Marlboro Man Bullsh*t”

This week, Prime Video’s The Boys is finally back on our screen for Season 3 — and they’re bringing a brand new face with them: Supernatural star Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy. The series’ messed up take on Captain America is the original superhero, and part of an overall mystery that fuels the season. But for showrunner Eric Kripke, who had worked with Ackles previously on Supernatural, getting the right man in the outfit was half the mystery solved.

“Jensen, he’s the best,” Kripke told Decider. “Obviously, I’ve worked with him for a minute and everything I throw at him, I know he can do. He can be charming. He can be funny. He can be scary. He can credibly do action. He can make you cry, and so I needed somebody who could do all those colors. Once Jensen was locked in, it [was] a relief for me, really, because I know him so well that I can write really confidently.”

The exact circumstances of how Soldier Boy plays into the season are shrouded in mystery, but we do know based on trailers and footage that the supe is both a riff on Captain America, and The Winter Soldier. Though the costume eschews red, white and blue for a more camo green, Soldier Boy is the symbol of macho America through multiple wars, until he’s seemingly discovered frozen — and then reanimated — by the titular Boys.

So it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Soldier Boy does return in some fashion; and when he does, things are off to the races.

“Playing the oldest superhero on the scene with a bunch of new faces, essentially, it was… Just kind of keeping him on mission, on task,” Ackles said. “He’s back, he’s got vendetta, and he’s got a list of people that he’s checking off. So it was more of just watching him go through this physical journey, not necessarily an emotional journey.”

There are plenty of surprises down the road when it comes to Soldier Boy, and his role in the plot. But as usual with The Boys, it’s a lot more about pointedly talking about what’s going on in America right now, and then using superheroes as a metaphor to show off the ugliest, worst parts of ourselves.

“Soldier Boy to me is very symbolic of 60 plus years of what pop culture has defined as masculine and that macho John Wayne, Marlboro Man bullshit,” Kripke noted. “His arc was presenting as that, but then revealing more and more what a sham that is and how nobody is like that and it never existed, and yet we’ve poisoned generation after generation of boys by telling them they somehow have to meet this impossible ideal.

“One of the reasons we had such a piece of shit president who thought it was more important to project vitality over compassion, the reason Putin is who he is. So much of it is because these people are trying to be macho instead of being human. So I wanted to give Soldier Boy that arc.”

The Boys Season 3 premieres Friday, June 3 with three new episodes.