The Boys' showrunner reveals how they got Samuel L. Jackson to play a shark in season 5

‘That’s a bucket list moment’

The Boys has had a lot of cameos in its fifth and final season. MSNBC host Chris Hayes played himself, questioning Vice President Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) during a press conference in the season premiere. Episode 5 became a full Supernatural reunion as The Boys and Supernatural showrunner Eric Kripke had Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Homelander (Antony Starr) crash a poker game including supes played by Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins. The show’s executive producer Seth Rogen was also at the card table along with Kumail Nanjiani, Will Forte, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse all playing versions of themselves.

Kripke tells Polygon that a lot of the show's biggest cameos are thanks to Rogen's involvement. “A lot of the cameos we bring into the show are because Seth Rogen or [executive producer] Evan Goldberg have a relationship with them and can make a call. I lean on them a lot for that stuff.” However, there's one cameo in the latest episode of The Boys that was a true bucket list moment for the series' creator.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Boys season 5, episode 7]

Samuel L. Jackson voices a hammerhead shark named Xander in episode 7, "The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother's Milk," who threatens The Deep (Chace Crawford) for blowing up an underwater pipeline. The Deep rode Xander when chasing A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) and his family in the season 5 premiere, but the shark is in no mood to do the Lord of the Seven Seas favors when he returns in the show’s penultimate episode.

According to Kirpke, it was pure luck that they were able to get Jackson onboard.

“We wanted a really distinct voice and who has a more distinct voice in Hollywood than Sam Jackson? So we just went to his agent," the showrunner says. "He was our first choice, and we were like, Does he want to do this? It was really just taking a flyer. But then it came back, Oh yeah, he likes the show and totally, he'll do it. Boy, that's a bucket list moment, man, of Sam Jackson reading your dialogue.”

Jackson isn’t the first A-list star to voice a sea creature on The Boys. Tilda Swinton played the Deep’s octopus lover Ambrosius in season 4. Xander appears in episode 7 to warn the Deep that he doesn’t have any friends left in the ocean after the oil pipeline disaster that killed an enormous number of fish in episode 6. If the Deep goes back in the water, he’ll wind up like Jackson’s character in Deep Blue Sea. It’s a revelation that keeps the Deep from saving a drowning man, turning what should be a moment of heroism into just another demonstration of how pathetic he is. Kripke says the supe gets exactly what he deserves.

“The Boys actually takes place in a reasonably just universe,” Kripke says. “Terrible things happen to good people all the time, just like they do in the real world. But by and large, when you make the right moral choice on the show, you tend to be rewarded, and when you make the wrong one, you tend to be punished. Firecracker and Deep make nothing but the wrong choices. They're presented with many opportunities to do the right thing, and they just choose not to.”

---

The first seven episodes of The Boys season 5 are available to stream now on Prime Video.