This article contains spoilers for The Boys Season 5, Episode 7, which is available on Prime Video now.
Homelander (Antony Starr) is your god now… or at least, the newly established Democratic Church of America would very much like him to be. As of this week’s penultimate episode of Prime Video’s The Boys, titled "The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother's Milk," he’s got the musical number to prove it, if Oh Father (Daveed Diggs) can get his performers up to speed on the show’s latest barn-burner – a profane, prophetic ditty that urges followers of the Supe to “raise him up.”
The show has featured multiple musical numbers before, from Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and Frenchie’s (Tomer Capone) old Hollywood dance number to “I Got Rhythm” in Season 3, to Season 4’s outrageous Ice Capades-infused “Let’s Put The Christ Back In Christmas.” But it’s still a surprise when everyone bursts into song on the dark superhero series; it’s less of a surprise when you cast Broadway icon Diggs, who originated the roles of Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton. Funnily enough, the musical happened because Diggs was cast and not the other way around.
“I was in London, I believe, and I saw the announcement that Daveed got cast in the show, and they didn't even say what, they just said, ‘Daveed Diggs has been added to the cast of The Boys for Season 5,” composer Christopher Lennertz told IGN. “I immediately texted [showrunner Eric] Kripke and was like, ‘if he's on the show and we don't have him sing, we all deserve what we get. It's a travesty.’”
A few hours later (once he had woken up after the 3am PT text), Kripke texted Lennertz back, asking the eager composer to “give me a beat.” That beat, it turns out, was several months later, as Diggs’ casting was announced on September 24, 2024, the final season of the series began production on November 25, 2024, and it wasn’t until they were already midway through production that Kripke broached the subject with his performer.
“We were a few episodes in already, and Kripke, very sweetly and almost sheepishly, approached me with this idea,” Diggs explained to IGN, “and I was very appreciative of how he approached because certainly people have asked me to do musical numbers and other things, and I generally refuse. But they do music so well on this show.”
Lennertz, meanwhile, was waiting with bated breath as he “started hearing, ‘oh, there might be a shot at it,’ and [Kripke] kept smiling.”
Ultimately, what swayed Diggs was the same thing that swayed him to join The Boys at all. “I entered with the mindset, I really trust what these writers are doing, and I want to be along for the ride. I want to do all the crazy things they want to do. So when they did approach me with it, I took a day to think about it, to make sure that it felt good to myself. And I was like, ‘Yeah, let's do this. This is gonna be super fun.’ And I was right.”
After that, a few short months before the seventh episode was going into production, Lennertz finally got the script pages with the reveal of what the content of the song would be, and he couldn’t have been more elated. “Once I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, my god, he's gonna announce Homelander is god. It just couldn't be more perfect.”
“It's all about hearts and minds,” Diggs added on the thrust of the musical number. “We're trying to get the kids on board. We got to get everybody on board. Everybody has to be dancing. It's got to be the old ladies and the teenagers and the babies, everybody, we all need to be in this.”
Once the subject of the song was decided, it was time to actually make the thing, which both Lennertz and Diggs noted was a collaborative effort between the two of them as well as showrunner Kripke. “He’s a genius, man,” Lennertz said of working with Diggs. In fact, Lennertz requested being able to write with Diggs because he knew the actor needed to perform the number “in a cadence and rhythm he feels comfortable with.” Not only that, but there’s the tricky nature of Diggs performing the number not as Diggss, but in character as Oh Father, a super-powered preacher utterly devoted to proselytizing the word of Homelander. The number itself is also gospel-inspired, meaning that “even when they’re speaking, it’s almost like song.”
With all those thoughts in the mix, Diggs and Lennertz began breaking down the lyrics. “We were texting couplets back and forth,” Lennertz said, with Diggs adding that “Chris was super collaborative. It was awesome. Ultimately, I didn't have any really musical or textual notes, maybe one little text tweak. But it was really Chris and his team and Kripke keeping me in the loop.” Once the lyrics were good to go, the team brought the production to Kripke. According to Lennertz, he “wrote a couple of words on it too. We really built it in a way to try to make it feel like it was a singing version of what the audience had already gotten used to [with] Oh Father up until this point of the show.”
Just in case you’re shaking your head reading this and saying, “Yeah right, that’s Daveed up there,” well… he disagrees. The multi-hyphenate explained to Lennertz that he’s “more of a rapper” and does “a lot of modern stuff,” while the number itself, per the brief from Kripke, was meant to be closer to R&B duo Sam & Dave and the legendary James Brown, while Lennertz also pitched Otis Redding. Lennertz did admit that “there’s plenty of Daveed in it – all of his attitude, all of his charisma.” But ultimately the goal was to channel Oh Father.
“He came in to record it at my studio here in LA,” Lennertz said, “and by take number two, we're like, ‘I don't know, man, it's pretty great. If you want to do it again, you can, but it's awesome.’ He had that swagger that's part of his own personality.”
“The day of doing the vocal recordings was a really fun collaborative day,” Diggs added, “figuring out how to pitch things, and the actual performance side of it.” It helped that by that point, Diggs had already performed a pseudo-musical number on his first day on the show: the sermon memorializing A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) in Episode 2 of the season. “I was already good, and that was before they asked me to do a musical number,” Diggs continued.
While everything with Diggs went swimmingly, Lennertz notes that the song “was recorded somewhat backwards” from the way they would normally approach something like this. The regular procedure is to create a demo and then have Diggs return to finish the song, but because of the demanding production schedule and limited time with the actor, they had to complete the rhythm section – bass, drums, guitar – first. Then they brought in Diggs, before finishing with brass, strings, and finally the choir. The whole thing needed to be finished before shooting the number, while Diggs was on his way back to Toronto to finish up shooting the season.
“We needed to make sure that the drum fills lined up, and the gospel choir behind him was singing the right background vocals. We probably got that done 10 days before they shot it.” From there, the choir memorized the words, choreographer Amy Wright mapped out the dance, and Lennertz flew out just in time to watch them film the sequence. ”I was having a hard time not giggling too loud. I know they're shooting and I shouldn't make any noise, but it's just so funny. It was such a great, great sequence.”
One potential challenge to the performance was the bulky superhero costume Diggs dons as Oh Father, potentially limiting his movement. As Diggs notes, however, his supersuit was “the beneficiary of five seasons of R and D on these costumes. Judging from how everybody else felt all the time, I probably had the most comfortable and movable costume out of anybody's. It's not the most comfortable, but they take six months at least to build these things, and we did so many fittings and they're so precise. It gets warm, and singing like that with all the extra weight and pressure on it, after the fortieth take, is harder. But all things considered, it's actually a pretty forgiving suit.”
Perhaps the most shocking part of the number, though, is how prescient it is. A major plotline of the season follows Homelander seeing a vision of Elisabeth Shue’s Madelyn Stillwell as an angel, and subsequently deciding to make himself into America’s new god. Then, mere days before the plotline debuted in the season’s third episode, President Trump posted a meme that depicted him as, one might argue, a Jesus-like figure.
“It was like the universe put a silver platter of gifts on our play,” Lennertz said laughing, when asked if he had any hesitation about the song after this sequence of real world events. “The entire sequence and song was done six months before the election last year. We shot most of it in May, so way before the election. And then it happened. And then beyond that, he literally dropped that crazy meme. And next week, Elisabeth Shue is taking off her top as an angel and saying you're the chosen one, and it looked just like [the meme]. It had the bright lights, and I couldn't believe it.”
“So I'm really excited to see what people's reactions to the song are, because it's too close, right? I mean, because the crazy thing is [that] Trump doesn't make these memes, he reshares them. In the background, all these people and fans are feeding him things like, ‘Ooh, you should be God. You're really the chosen one.’ It's just like Homelander. There's literally the one line where Eric was like, ‘well, that's the line that's got to be in there.’ And it says, ‘We need a God who's strong and just and American like us.’ And then Daveed improvised the salute, and on the day, I was watching him do it. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so perfect.’ But even then, I didn't know that it was exactly what's going on, [with Pete] Hegseth literally talking every day about how what we're doing is divine. I think our writers room is the new Simpsons, and it blows my mind every day how many things they get right. It's very scary. It's a little bit sad. But it's also amazing.”
Since the series finale probably doesn’t end with a big song and dance number recapping the show, this is likely Lennertz’s final musical number for The Boys. “It's bittersweet to go out, certainly, but it is a great way going out with Daveed Diggs announcing the second coming of Jesus Christ in a cape and suit with a codpiece, as someone who loves to do satire,” Lennertz said. “I don't know if I could think of a better setup than that. It really was the pinnacle, [putting] Homelander on the highest rung, and to do it with someone who is probably one of the greatest performers on Broadway in the last 20 years. Man, that was a treat. I'll tell you that.”
That said, this isn’t the last you’ll see – or rather hear – from Lennertz in The Boys’ universe. “I am coming back for Vought Rising,” Lennertz teased about The Boys prequel series. “[I’m] very excited. We actually started the music a little bit. And Eric seems to love the songs. So without any spoilers, I hope that there's going to be some songs in the show.”
Perhaps Lennertz, who wrote songs for the extended version of Marvel’s Rogers: The Musical that briefly played at Disney’s California Adventure theme park, will bring some of the “Star Spangled Man” with a plan to Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy in the upcoming series? We’ll have to wait and see on that one, but on the flip side, will we ever get to see Diggs perform this episode’s musical number live on stage?
“I don't know!” Diggs said. “I haven't thought about that until you said it. You won't see it on my tour, only if The Boys is asking me to do it.”
So is that confirmation of The Boys: Live On Broadway?
“Yeah, yeah!” Diggs said, laughing, before adding, “Eight shows a week is a tall order for Oh Father.”
source https://www.ign.com/articles/inside-the-boys-oh-father-daveed-diggs-musical-number