SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the latest episode of Gen V. If you have not yet watched the show, proceed at your own risk!
Audiences have seen all varieties of freaky villains and powers in the canon of The Boys and Gen V, but Hamish Linklater’s Cipher in Season 2 of the latter has revealed himself as one of the freakiest. While there is still a lot that we don’t know about the prime antagonist, we have gotten a full dose of the danger that he presents and it’s eye opening – as he can simply take over minds and operate others like puppets.
Cipher showing what he can do has already led to some amazing scenes in Gen V Season 2 – including the scary Blood Bender vs. Gender Bender fight in Episode 4, and more recently, in “Cooking Lessons” when the big bad takes control of Sean Patrick Thomas’ Polarity. I had the chance to speak with both Thomas and Linklater last month during the Los Angeles press day for the new run of the show (as captured in the video at the top of this article), and they told me what it was like to shoot that sequence, which involved interesting collaboration and synchronicity. Thomas explained,
It was fun because I felt like there was a certain like speech pattern that they wanted me to establish, and I didn't know if that was something that they thought that that was your speech pattern or something that was a speech pattern that they just wanted, but we had to get on the same page with that. And then when you see it on screen, it's very cool. Yeah, it is very creepy.
Polarity – who has been in deep grief this season following the death of his son, Chance Perdomo's Andre Anderson – has become an ally for the heroes of Gen V, but in the scene in question, he is forced to betray them. Marie and the others call on him for help after they escape Elmira and are granted shelter by Giancarlo Esposito’s Stan Edgar, but they don’t realize that when they call Polarity, they are talking directly to Cipher, who is talking through him.
Cipher is most definitely not a kind puppet master, as he is a big fan of getting people to give themselves a strong whack across their own face – and Hamish Linklater noted in the conversation that figuring out the mechanics of executing something like that is something that is really more discovered on set and in the performances than following strict directives from the script. He told me,
It seems like these sort of super situations have like very strict rules, but then you get there on the day and you're like, 'What's actually gonna look cool?' But wasn't there a lot of discussion about whether I had to move my hand to have you slap yourself? And so these rules, you know, they kind of get made up made up along the way sometimes.
What other horrifying moves does Cipher have up his sleeve? You’ll have to keep watching Gen V Season 2 to find out. New episodes arrive weekly for those with an Amazon Prime subscription, and with the arrival of “Hell Week” today, fans can get excited for the action packed finale that will drop next Wednesday, October 22.
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