Starring on Prime Video's wildly successful series “The Boys” has many benefits, but it also has one major drawback. Almost every actor involved in the show is guaranteed to go through at least one truly disgusting, disturbing scene. It ended with Erin Moriarty, who plays Starlight, mixing up the lube while filming “Herogasm,” for example, and “The Deep” actor Chace Crawford had to pretend to eat her octopus friend Timothy. There's also often a lot of body fluids involved, which is a serious problem for Mother's Milk's heroine, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and is afraid of germs. Laz Alonso, who plays MM, has had to go through more than his fair share of disgusting moments, and in Season 4, he had his worst moment ever.
In an episode of the Midnight Boys podcast, Alonso shared some behind-the-scenes details about the filming of a truly disgusting scene in the sixth episode of the fourth season, aptly titled “Dirty Business.” Mother's Milk has certainly seen a harsh ending to this deal more than once, and it may just be the character who has had the most disgusting moments, but for Alonso, it looks like what happened in Season 4 really won out.
One moment caused Alonso to break character
Poor Mother Milk really had to put up with a lot of absurd and disgusting things in The Boys. He was sprayed with gallons of fake semen and hit with a long, moving motion I love sausage (don't ask), but in Season 4 he had to help Web-Weaver (Dan Mousseau) inject drugs into his, uh, backdoor. Instead, he initially sticks the syringe into the hole in Web-Weaver's web, located just above his poop hole, but then he gets it right and Web-Weaver shoots the web right into MM's cheek. It's a bit of a nightmare for anyone, but for someone with OCD it's even worse. For Alonso, filming wasn't much better, as he explained on the podcast:
“As you know, I have filmed a lot of disgusting things on our show. This is the only scene in my entire career… this is the only scene where I broke my character and screamed. I lack protection from the other actor. I won't tell you what happened during the scene that made me break my character and literally scream in fear and apologize profusely to this man for literally like an hour straight.
It appears there was an accident that resulted in Alonso potentially touching Mousseau's chocolate starfish, which is quite traumatic as far as acting accidents go. It's hard to blame Alonso for screaming and apologizing so much, although it's pretty crazy that he found himself in so many crazy situations at the beginning of the show.
The weirdness of the Web-Weaver may have been too much
What happened to Web-Weaver isn't the only time Alonso had a terrible moment on set (he also had an encounter with the Gill of the Deep), but he took it all in stride. However, it is puzzling why there are so many extreme moments and what effect they have on the series as a whole. While some of the disgusting moments are genuinely funny, there are also some that go too far, and everything on Web-Weaver certainly does that. The drug shot and the mesh are kind of funny, if a little sad and gross, but when Hughie (Jack Quaid) wears a Web-Weaver suit and gets into a sexual assault with Tek Knight (Derek Wilson), it's way, way too much.
It will be interesting to see how the team behind “The Boys” handles its fifth and final season, and whether they try to up the ante in the face of this nastiness. With escalating bodily fluids, killer animals, and dark humor, we'll almost certainly be grossed out.
