SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for The Boys Season 5 premiere. If you have not yet watched, make good use of your Amazon Prime subscription, catch up now, and then head back here!
In the weeks leading up to the premiere of The Boys Season 5, Karl Urban was quoted as saying that nobody in the cast is safe and that there are fatalities right from the get go. After watching the first episode, we now know what he is talking about. In the final moments, the audience says goodbye to Jesse T. Usher's A-Train, who has been a key player on the show since the pilot. It's a huge and emotional moment given everything that the character has gone through and how he has changed – but the moment is made particularly perfect because he goes out laughing in the face of Antony Starr's Homelander.
When I interviewed the cast of The Boys last month during the show's virtual press day, I made a point of asking Usher about A-Train getting to go out with a smile on his face, and I was surprised to learn the origin of the fantastic emotional expression: it wasn't in the script, and he didn't think of it himself; instead, he gives credit for inspiration to his talented scene partner. The actor took me back to the night that the scene was shot and detailed how it went down:
Man, to be honest with you, that laugh came out in one of the later takes that we had done, and it was actually Antony's idea. He sort of introduced the idea to me. We were sitting there and we spent a lot of time on that moment. We played that moment out in a lot of different variations, right? Where we were sort of back and forth of how one character would react to the other character delivering whichever line in a certain way.
Over the course of the first four seasons of The Boys, A-Train and Homelander maintained a fraught and complicated relationship. As a member of the revered The Seven, the blue-clad speedster most definitely enjoyed living the consequence-free life of a supe, but that also came with a cost. Like all of his teammates, he lived in fear of their star-spangled leader, and that fear forced him to do a lot of terrible things and make a lot of horrible choices. At the end of Season 4, he finally starts to break away, but that unleashes Homelander's full fury.
Continuing, Usher explained that part of the behind-the-scenes process on set for the actors was to go back and forth asking questions – the idea being to find the emotional truth of the moment. That was uncovered when Starr submitted a particular query:
Antony comes to me and he just asked a couple questions, and I would ask him some, and one of the questions that he asked me was like, 'Do you think A-Train's happy about this?' You know what I mean? And I was like, 'I think he's relieved.' I feel like he's relieved, and at the end of the road, I think the very last thing that he realizes is how ridiculous all of this has been. It's just, it's ridiculous. And I think it's to the point where it's almost comical. And that's where [the laugh] sort of comes from.
It's definitely not crazy for anyone in the universe of The Boys to be afraid of Homelander, as he is practically invincible, stacked with all kinds of dangerous powers, and a total psychopath. But as we've also seen through four seasons, his emotional fragility and extreme insecurity is a major weakness, and A-Train has a natural reaction when he finally recognizes it. Usher continued,
When we get to that moment and we had this conversation throughout the night, and we get to one of our last takes, and then I'm watching Antony play Homelander, and he's just like huffing and puffing and he's really angry. And I'm looking around at the crew and, and I just go [starts laughing]. I just start chuckling. You know what I mean? And then I see him get infuriated in character, and it makes it even funnier! It just makes it funnier. It's like, what are we doing?
He added an apt metaphor that any of us can relate to: when we're kids, we can imagine all kinds of nightmares lurking in the shadows of the bedroom closet at night… but when you finally realize that there is nothing in there other than a bunch of clothes, you can't help but laugh at yourself. A-Train long saw Homelander as an unrelenting terror, and it took until his final moments to understand the reality of the villain. Usher concluded,
That's kind of how that felt. I can't believe that I've been doing this for so long and I've been hurting people for so long because of this guy. It's like, who is this dude? Like, bro, you're wearing tights. This is ridiculous. It's almost comical, and he's laughing to keep from crying in that moment, obviously. But yeah, it was just one of those resolute final moments where you know you're facing death and then everything just becomes funny.
It's a perfect, albeit dark conclusion for the premiere, and in addition to sending the message and the show isn't playing with kid gloves in the final run, it also demonstrates a wonderful understanding of the characters.
The Boys Season 5 is off and running, with the first two episodes now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video – and the next six will respectively premiere weekly on Wednesdays on the 2026 TV schedule.
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