The Boys season five: Karl Urban on Butcher’s mission and whether the show can still be considered satire

After one of the most famous and infamous action sequences on rambunctious TV show The Boys, Kiwi actor Karl Urban thought Greenpeace was going to show up at his door.

In the season two scene, Urban and his co-stars’ characters are in a speedboat fleeing an armada of sharks when an enormous sperm whale starts to block the heroes’ path to escape.

The only recourse is to ram their boat straight into the whale, the pointy bow piercing the creature’s bulbous body. It was disgusting as blood, guts and viscera are splashed everywhere, covering the actors in oozy blood. Jonah got off light in comparison.

The whale was obviously fake, and Greenpeace doesn’t concern itself with sea mammals created by practical and visual effects. But the scene speaks to The Boys’ commitment to maximalist television.

Few things are off limits and the more extreme, the more fans loved it.

“One of the crazier things I found myself doing is in a fight with like 10 or 12 naked men,” Urban told The Nightly. “The thing about this show is that you get to see, do and experience things that you will never see anywhere else in the landscape or in the history of television.”

From your run-of-the-mill exploding heads to a superhero orgy where one powered person’s special gift is a particularly enlarged member (an episode titled Herogasm), The Boys made a feast out of pushing things.

Created for TV by Erik Kripke from graphic novels by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, The Boys was the anti-Marvel. The superheroes here are corrupt, power-mad and homicidal narcissists and the “good guys” are violent and deeply flawed.

At the centre of the battle is Urban’s Billy Butcher, a human-turned-supe with a penchant for vengeance, a sarcastic and caustic attitude and a dash of nihilism which masks his core belief in a better world.

At the other end is Homelander (Antony Starr), a sadistic sociopath with a crippling self-esteem problem and no impulse control who drapes himself in the symbols of American patriotism (and now Christendom) to commit fascism, murder and war crimes.

It debuted in 2019 and is now wrapping up with its fifth season, which is rolling out weekly now.

The Boys is known for its dark comedy, hijinks and ultra violence (one key character was dispatched at the end of season four by being literally ripped apart by Butcher), but the show has always functioned at different levels.

Take Butcher, for example, someone who was positioned as a hero, or at least an anti-hero, who in his quest to stop Homelander, has himself become a monster.

“You’ve got to know that he’s with you until he’s there to complete his own agenda,” Urban explained. But that agenda has morphed over the course of the series. Where he once was dead-set on revenge for what Homelander did to his wife Becca, he has since widened his mission.

“Butcher realised that the atrocities committed against his wife was minor in comparison to the existential threat that he saw coming down the road from not just Homelander but the abuse of power in the hands of all superheroes,” he said.

While Butcher was fighting for the future with a “means to an end” attitude, the story was in a battle for the character’s soul and humanity. There’s a scary utilitarianism to Butcher, where he begins to sacrifice individuals to the greater good.

“That’s one of the things I love about this show. It’s that it not only holds up a bit of a mirror to society, it makes a satirical commentary about where we’re all at, and it poses certain existential questions, ‘Like, what would you do if…?’.

“What would you do if you had a cancerous growth on your toe? Would you lop it off or risk it going further up your leg and take the whole leg? That’s kind of the position that Butcher is in.”

When the show debuted in 2019, it was two and a half years into Donald Trump’s first term in government, and over time, The Boys has become a potent allegory to explore fascism, misinformation, corporation-driven late-stage capitalism, political manipulation, religion and state power.

But now in 2026, as extreme as The Boys can be, it can feel less like satire and more like reality, just with superhero costumes.

In this new season, the use of a particularly American form of evangelical Christianity to validate corruption and state violence has haunting parallels to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unhinged evocation of God in the war against Iran.

Or Homelander’s demand that not only anti-him activists who have been present at rallies and protests be locked up, but also anyone who has posted anything defamatory (ie. negative) about him online.

Video evidence of crimes are decried as deep-fakes while social media is flooded with disinformation so no one can discern what’s real or not. Billionaires are at the whims of whatever Homelander and his lackeys want, and performative patriotism is a cloak for safety in a dangerous environment.

It all feels quite close to the truth, so can The Boys still be a form of entertainment?

“One of the strengths of the show is that it’s a fun show,” Urban said. “It’s about characters struggling to hold onto their humanity. It’s about hope.

“It pokes fun at the left, it pokes fun at the right. We take shots at everything from TikTokkers to big franchise entertainment vehicles.

“The key to any good TV show, and that has certainly been the case historically, is that it functions on multiple levels and The Boys does that.

“You could make the argument that The Boys is a sort of comedic valve for the scarier events that are happening in the world.

“Ultimately, this is just a show about great characters trying to make the right choices. It’s engineered to entertain people and if it’s thought-provoking along the way, then that’s fantastic.

“It’s a unique project and one that I’m confident will stand the test of time, and people will enjoy coming back to watch again and again.”

The Boys is streaming on Prime Video