Erin Moriarty Reveals She Filmed a Steamy ‘The Boys’ Scene While Battling a Brutal Staph Infection

Erin Moriarty spent five seasons bringing Annie January, better known as Starlight, to life on Prime Video’s ‘The Boys,’ and along the way she quietly carried more physical pain than fans ever realized. The actress has become increasingly candid about her health in recent months, using her platform to talk openly about what she endured behind the scenes of the hit superhero satire.

That candor continued during a June 30 appearance on Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Christina Applegate’s podcast, where Moriarty sat down to discuss her time on the series and the toll it took on her body. The conversation quickly turned personal, with Moriarty peeling back the curtain on a specific night shoot early in the show’s run that she says pushed her to a breaking point.

Moriarty recalled that during season two she became so run down that she developed a severe staph infection right as production geared up for an intimate scene between Starlight and Hughie, played by Jack Quaid. She said she couldn’t move her right arm but still had a night shoot scheduled, and she told production about it during her appearance on the podcast.

Moriarty described telling the crew she had what felt like a second head growing out of her armpit, joking that even if everyone wanted to push forward with the scene, that was the reality of what they were working with. Despite the pain, the show moved ahead as planned, and Moriarty ultimately filmed the scene alongside Quaid’s Hughie Campbell, her character’s longtime love interest for most of the series.

The revelation lands as part of a much larger story Moriarty has been telling about her health throughout her run on ‘The Boys.’ She has said it wasn’t until the final season of shooting that she got serious about addressing her symptoms, crediting a close friend who noticed something was wrong and urged her to get bloodwork done immediately. That decision eventually led to her diagnosis with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid.

Moriarty detailed the fuller arc of that diagnosis in a personal essay, describing years of undiagnosed symptoms including memory loss, fatigue and heart palpitations that plagued her while she worked on the show. Months after starting treatment, she was hospitalized on August 1, 2025, following a severe mental health crisis, which she wrote about in an essay for TIME. She has said she hopes being transparent about her symptoms can help someone else catch a similar illness earlier than she caught her own.

Looking back, the staph infection story adds another layer to just how much Moriarty was quietly pushing through during her time on the Amazon Prime series, long before fans understood the full picture of what she was dealing with physically. It is a reminder of the demands placed on actors even during scenes that read as routine on screen.

With Moriarty now speaking freely about what really happened behind the cameras during Starlight and Hughie’s most talked about moments, fans are left wondering just how many other tough shoots she powered through in silence, so what do you think Moriarty’s revelation says about the hidden costs of bringing Starlight’s story to life.