For so many years, Jensen Ackles was arguably most known for his Supernatural stretch, but the time since that show ended has seen him joining a variety of different projects, from Tracker to Countdown to The Boys. The actor is thankfully set to reprise his suped-up role of Soldier Boy for the latter’s fifth and final season, which wrapped filming in July, and he’ll be evolving the ego-driven character even more when the prequel Vought Rising is available to stream via Amazon Prime subscription.
No, Soldier Boy will not be the exact same hard-nosed asshat whenever fans catch up with his younger self in the new spinoff, and that sounds very encouraging to someone like me who kinda hates to love watching Ackles play such a prejudiced worm. For as much fun as it is to watch, the morally defunct character gets my blood boiling. So I’m happy that Ackles told Variety the character changes will be obvious to spot from one show to the next. In his words:
Obviously, they’re the same guy, but certainly there’s a lot of life that Soldier Boy has lived when we see him in ‘The Boys’ and when we see him in Season 5 — how he’s relating to people, the things that are important to him, the things that he’s willing to just slough off, his idea of the life he wants to lead. And then going back 70-odd years to see him when he was really starting to get going, I’m able now to deal with the struggles that made him who he became, and you start to see him before he has necessarily the swagger and the gravitas and the life lived of 75 years of being the top dog.
That explanation makes total sense, of course, as Soldier Boy's intolerance and anger weren't always so omnipresent within the V-addled supe. At least, that's what would might assume, although it's admittedly hard to assume anything positive about any of the characters that have ever been aligned with Vought International. I'm wondering how the reunion with his former SPN co-stars will go in that respect, and am hoping that Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins are both squarely on the protagonists' side.
Ackles shared more light details about what fans can expect to see from his more youthful era 70+ years before The Boys' current timeline, saying:
"[“Vought Rising”] predates all that, so I think I’m trying to show a little bit more of an early version of it — not necessarily an innocence to it, but there’s certainly scenes, relationships and character traits that predate how we see him in modern day, and that’s fun to play with.
Never "innnocence" with this guy. But maybe more playfulness and a slice of charm perhaps? Not that the actor is capable of delivering a performance completely free from charm.
For as much as I'm pumped that we wont' be watching solely the worst possible version of Soldier Boy in Vought Rising, Jensen Ackles did deflate that balloon a little bit by making it clear that the performances won't be like night and day, and that we'll see the character's habit and behaviors forming as we watch.
Now, that’s not to say he’s going to be a completely different character and he’s not going to be the tough guy that I think we know and love. That’s there, and we’ll get there quickly, but it is fun to show the origin of how this guy became who he is, and what were the little tricks and little tics that crafted him into where we see him now.
Neither The Boys Season 5 nor Vought Rising have release dates set, and neither will likely arrive before the 2025 TV schedule has gone belly-up. But franchise fans cand definitely look forward to the upcoming superhero series Gen V dropping its long-awaited Season 2 on September 17.
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