Chace Crawford Had No Idea Samuel L. Jackson Was the Voice Behind ‘The Boys’ Shark Scene, and His Reaction Says Everything
Nobody on ‘The Boys‘ has been humiliated more consistently than The Deep, and the Prime Video series has made its final season a prolonged reckoning for Chace Crawford’s aquatic superhero. After years of cowardice, sycophancy toward Homelander, and one self-inflicted disaster after another, Kevin Moskowitz has spent the show’s farewell run watching every last safety net get pulled out from under him.
The cruelest development arrives in the penultimate episode, when Xander, a hammerhead shark The Deep had ridden in the season premiere while hunting A-Train, resurfaces on a dock with a very different agenda. The shark delivers a profanity-laden ultimatum, warning The Deep he is no longer welcome in any ocean, stream, or puddle on earth, as payback for his role in endorsing a Vought pipeline that wiped out vast numbers of marine creatures. The sequence lands as a gut-punch before the audience fully registers whose voice is delivering the threats.
That voice belongs to Samuel L. Jackson, who voiced the CGI shark in a cameo that left viewers stunned and sent social media into immediate frenzy when the episode dropped. The casting carries its own poetic layer, since Jackson was memorably devoured by a shark in the 1999 film ‘Deep Blue Sea,’ making his turn as Xander a deliberate reversal of that cultural moment, with the actor finally getting to be the predator rather than the prey.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has explained that Jackson was always the first and only real choice for the voice, with the production simply reaching out to his agent on a long shot, only to discover the actor was already a genuine fan of the show and eager to take part. Jackson recorded his lines during a free morning in New York City while Kripke directed the session remotely from Los Angeles. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Kripke described the experience as a genuine career milestone, calling it a bucket-list moment to watch Jackson deliver the dialogue and noting that the scene works so perfectly because The Deep is being dressed down by someone who is exceptionally skilled at exactly that.
What makes Crawford’s side of the story particularly enjoyable is that he had no idea any of this was happening while they were actually shooting. As he recounted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he spent the entire sequence talking to a tennis ball in a freezing cold lake, with nothing to indicate who would eventually be completing the scene. He only found out during additional dialogue recording, when the crew casually revealed the casting, and after hearing the playback, his honest verdict was that the shark steals the whole scene.
The tradition of keeping celebrity castings hidden from Crawford appears to be something of a recurring feature on the show, with the actor noting he had an almost identical experience discovering that Tilda Swinton had voiced The Deep’s octopus companion Ambrosius in a previous season, again finding out only after filming had wrapped. Season five has leaned heavily into this approach throughout its run, bringing in a Supernatural reunion, a celebrity poker game stacked with well-known names, and a steady stream of guest appearances that have kept fans guessing right up to the finale.
With ‘The Boys’ series finale now on the horizon and Xander’s threat against The Deep still very much unresolved, the fandom is already debating the only question that really matters heading into the last hour: does Kevin Moskowitz find some improbable sliver of redemption, or does the ocean finally collect on everything it is owed?
