Chace Crawford Admits The Deep’s Most Disturbing ‘The Boys’ Scene Was Added After He Was Already Cast

Few superhero shows in recent memory have provoked as much conversation as ‘The Boys,’ the Amazon Prime Video series that turned the genre’s most familiar tropes inside out. The Eric Kripke-created show, adapted from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic series, takes place in a world where superheroes have embraced corruption, and follows a group of vigilantes determined to take them down. From the very first episode, the series made clear it was not interested in playing it safe.

Central to that opening statement was a scene involving The Deep, the Aquaman-style member of elite team The Seven, and new recruit Starlight. The pilot episode sees Starlight, played by Erin Moriarty, coerced into a sexual encounter by The Deep, using his superior standing within the organization to silence her afterward. The scene immediately became one of the most discussed moments in the show’s entire run, drawing both intense criticism and praise for its unflinching honesty.

What fans are only now fully grasping is how late in the process that moment was actually inserted. According to a recent appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard, Crawford revealed that the assault was not part of the original script he auditioned with, and that producers approached him after he had already been cast to tell him the storyline would be pulled from the source comics, naming him as “the guy to do it.”

Crawford admitted he was nervous about filming it during the height of the Me Too movement. Speaking with Collider, Crawford confirmed that when he first read the script, the scene simply was not there, adding that he had heard rumblings they might want to include it because it was in the comics and served as a major launching point for Starlight’s character.

The scene went through multiple revisions before making it to screen, with showrunner Eric Kripke rethinking the approach entirely after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in late 2017. Kripke noted that the original plan had Starlight with virtually no way to publicly confront her attacker, but the cultural shift brought on by the Me Too movement changed the trajectory of her entire arc. What had been a story told behind closed doors became one with public consequences for The Deep.

It was actually the female writers and producers on the show who insisted the scene remain in some form, with Kripke noting that he had initially leaned toward avoiding it altogether before his team pushed back, arguing that it was something real women had experienced and that the show needed to address it seriously. That creative pressure is what ultimately shaped the version audiences saw.

Crawford has previously acknowledged that even though the scene does not show anything explicitly, the implication carries enormous weight, and the producers were insistent that the moment not be glorified or sensationalized. The care taken in framing it from Starlight’s perspective is widely credited with giving the scene its impact rather than its shock value alone.

Much of ‘The Boys” ongoing commentary on real-world power dynamics flows directly from this opening moment, with The Deep’s arc across subsequent seasons functioning as a darkly comic mirror of the backlash that often follows public accusations of misconduct. Crawford’s candid recollections on Armchair Expert add a new layer to just how many moving parts had to align for that storyline to exist at all.

How do you think ‘The Boys’ handled The Deep and Starlight’s story across the seasons, and does knowing the scene was a late addition change how you see it?