Warning: Huge spoilers for The Boys season 4, episode 6.
Valorie Curry grew up in California, but not the progressive California people so often think of. “I grew up in Orange County, in the suburbs south of LA,” she tells StyleCaster. “So these days, it’s very purple, but when I was growing up, it was very conservative, very religious. We took school field trips to the Nixon Library.”
Playing a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist, Curry’s character in Prime Video‘s hit series The Boys draws from many larger-than-life nut jobs—some of Firecracker’s dialogue comes from the actual mouths of politicians—but this actor has a lot of personal experience to be inspired by, too. “There is something cathartic in getting to do this clowning act,” she says. “It’s that stuff that you forget from your childhood, and then there’s this muscle memory that kicks in.”
Related: The Best The Boys‘ Theories on the Worm Inside Billy Butcher’s Head
When she signed onto the show, Curry didn’t know much about her character, other than “her history with Starlight, her podcast, and her politics,” but it wasn’t until the making of Firecracker’s supersuit, an arduous, time-consuming process, that it really all started to come together. Curry was flying in and out of LA every 10 days for months because every detail of Firecracker’s suit is intentional, right down to the zip pull at the back. “It’s a cock ring,” she laughs. Of course it is! “It has to hold, but it also has to be soft enough if you’re getting thrown around,” she explains.
Curry has never played such a hyper-feminine, sexualized role before, and in episode 6, Firecracker’s true powers are explored in great detail. “This character essentially embodies the male gaze,” she observes. “A weaponization of femininity and self-objectification.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. We did warn you, spoilers ahead.
There’s a lot to unpack in this episode. We learn that Firecracker has been taking hormones to make herself lactate to prove she’s loyal to the cause and to Homelander (Antony Starr). Did you know the breastfeeding scene was on the agenda at the start?
I did not know. The idea was floated to me a couple of months before, and then I saw the script about a month before. It seems inevitable, like, “Of course, this is happening.” I’ve watched the show and it’s been building to somebody doing this with Homelander. I don’t think of it so much as a being about loyalty though, Firecracker does have this really preternatural intuition about what people need and a shameless willingness to give that to them, whatever it is.
In shooting this scene and going back and forth on the dialogue, there’s a real danger about it. There is a vulnerability in saying to Homelander, “I see your humanity, I see what you’ve been trying to hide—this thing that’s viewed as a very freakish fetish,” and she’s naming it to him. At that moment, she also gets to show him she’s not afraid of him. Because he could, at any point, laser her face off.
How many takes of the milk squirt did you do?
The good thing about having the time built in to really fine-tune that scene was that we got to work with this incredible intimacy coordinator, Casey Hudecki. She was invaluable to me in the process. So when we got to set, we knew exactly what every single shot was going to be. It was very clearly storyboarded.
Is there a bottle or something just off-camera?
No! This is all sightline gags, so two things have to happen—and credit to the crew to make this work. One of them was that the wardrobe department had a weekend to build some kind of undergarment structure that would allow me to unzip the front and still have the cleavage still be perky. I’m literally wearing two cutlets per breast [laughs], there is so much padding.
They went through three or four different phases of corsets, and then I think it was Casey’s idea—because she’s a fencer—to use a fencing breastplate. Then, if you can picture a microphone stand with a tube running from the other side of Homelander’s apartment, there’s this little nozzle that they kept having to adjust so it was at the right height for me to get the right trajectory and the right amount of milk. Anthony did take almond milk straight in the eye in one shot.
You would think that this very sexualized character is going to be the one who’s doing very sexually explicit things. Even though the scene is extreme in its content, it’s not sexual by nature.
Valorie Curry
I was going to ask if it was real milk or just milky water.
Yeah, I think it was almond. And I think I was at least two and a half feet away from him.
His reaction is just so good, too.
Yeah, the timing and the edit of it, it’s just beautiful.
It’s an interesting contrast, too, because we’ve seen Homelander grapple with aging this season—he’s literally plucking his gray pubes out and keeping them in a jar. Then you see him with you and he becomes an infant again.
Yeah. The other thing I want to speak to about this scene in particular is that it could have been very sexual and it could have been a joke. I love that where we got—and Antony and I were still on the same page about it—that it is so vulnerable and not sexual.
You would think that this very sexualized character is going to be the one who’s doing very sexually explicit things. Even though the scene is extreme in its content, it’s not sexual by nature. In contrast, you’ve got characters like Sister Sage and Ashley…
This episode is INSANE.
Ashely’s stuff in the dungeon! Everyone is finding a new limit that we did not know existed [laughs].
Can you talk about how this moment changes Firecracker’s trajectory?
So much of this episode is about Firecracker and her trauma of being dismissed or being marginalized or being treated like she’s trash. This is finally the moment where she thinks she’s in, and even then, she’s not really in. I think she’s also pushed to this moment with this choice because she’s finally showing that she should not be underestimated.
There’s even this joke about being in The Seven and what powers she really has, but it’s a real turn in that jostle for power. I don’t think Sage saw Firecracker coming, which serves her because sometimes it’s really cool to be underestimated.
I want to touch on something you said in a previous interview about being a queer person yourself playing this character who is aggressively anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQIA, etc. You said that it should be one of our own that gets to make an ass out of Firecracker. I loved that.
Thank you. Yeah, I have a pet peeve with actors who are on shows that clearly have political themes or have something to say, and then when they’re asked to speak to it, they equivocate. I understand the desire to not alienate anyone, but with a character like Firecracker, she has to be dealt with delicately because there’s a real danger there.
She’s representing real dangers with real people who are committing real violence against marginalized communities, and if you play the role in a way that minimizes that violence, and that danger, that is a problem. I’m not saying that an actor who isn’t queer wouldn’t do that, but I am excited to get to play her and get to have conversations like these where I get to make the politics explicit.
The show is unapologetic, I love working for a showrunner like Kripke where his politics are explicit. I felt like I was on a show where I could trust that this character could be handled responsibly. I do find it cathartic, and it’s what I hope for queer audiences, for any audience, that in watching the show, it’s sort of a reverse gaslighting. Another interviewer called it “spotlighting.”
There might be a catharsis in saying, “This is real, this is happening, and we’re going to show it and we’re going to show it as ugly and villainous, and absurd and stupid,” but also not undermining the real danger of it.
The Boys is available to stream on Prime Video with new episodes dropping each Thursday.
