More than a decade later, Chace Crawford has made quite the onscreen leap from locking lips with Serena van der Woodsen.
The Boys star admitted he “would have” had second thoughts about joining the show if he’d known about his aquatic superhero character The Deep’s sexual relationship with octopus Ambrosius (voiced by Tilda Swinton) on season 4 of the Prime Video series.
“It’s so funny and brilliant now, but when that came up, I was like, ‘Oh God, how’s this going to work?’” Crawford told Rolling Stone.
He also detailed how the intimate scenes were devised by showrunner Eric Kripke, recalling being “in total denial about it” the first time he had to film a sex scene with the sea creature in the infamous season 3 episode ‘Herogasm’.
“And then it got 24 hours out from the first day I had to shoot it and I almost had a panic attack,” said Crawford. “I called Kripke — he’s so great. He’s got a million things going on but his door’s always open. So I was worried about the scene. I’m like, ‘How are we gonna do this? What are the angles gonna be? How naked do I have to be?’ He changed one shot for me. And it was great.”
Tilda Swinton voices octopus Ambrosius, the love interest of Chace Crawford’s The Deep in season 4 of The Boys. (Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Crawford noted the show has an intimacy coordinator for sex scenes, “but not with the octopus,” adding: “But they treated it like, ‘quiet everyone, clear out’ — a closed set. But yeah, just the act of picking up the octopus and getting a wet octopus in the bed was so funny and weird. And then it doesn’t come out for a year almost, and you’re like, ‘How is this going to be received?’
“But everyone loved it,” added Crawford. “I saw someone at the gym the other day and he was like, ‘I’m actually going to show you this.’ And it was him in a Deep costume with a pink octopus wrapped around him at Comic-Con or something. Everyone loved it, man. I get ragged on a little bit, but it’s good.”
Kripke previously told Variety how Swinton’s surprise casting came to be after the writers decided they needed “the classiest, Oscar-winningest, British actress we can get our hands on” to voice Ambrosius. “And that’s a really short list. And Dame Judi Dench was unavailable,” he added.
To Swinton’s “everlasting credit,” Kripke said, “she didn’t know any of us, but she was like, ‘That sounds hilarious, I’m in,’ and she did it.”