Halfway through “The Boys” Season 4, things are looking grim for our untraditional heroes, as Frenchie (Tomer Capone) leaves The Boys to turn himself in for all the murders he committed prior to his time working with Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie (Jack Quaid), Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) and now Annie/Starlight (Erin Moriarty).
The decades of guilt over those deaths, including the blood on his hands from previously killing the family of his new love interest Colin (Elliot Knight) when Colin was younger, drove Frenchie to a drug-induced mental breakdown and subsequent confession at a jail at the end of the episode.But with The Boys investigating the supe virus and Homelander’s (Antony Starr) continued fight against humanity, why did Frenchie decide now was the time to go to jail, when he is sure to be needed by his friends?
“In a way, you’re trying to show what is a moral compass,” Capone told Variety. “This show has so many flawed characters. The good guys are bad and the bad guys are good. In the end, by Frenchie taking the decision of going and turning himself in, it’s a question of moral compass, of someone who wants to clean his rooms in his soul, who wants redemption, who wants to start over, who wants to be genuine and to balance his moral compass more than anything. In front of characters that are far away from that in the show, it gives a certain balance. We have to a little bit — just a little bit — show what’s the right decision opposite say Butcher’s decisions or Homelander’s decisions, which are, let’s face it, not amazing. But more than that, it’s a question I asked myself as well, ‘Why does he have the need to do it? Why did he do it when it was in the past?’ But the past always haunts us. All of us have this moment in life where we wish we could have gone back and redo some shit and be better. The question is, what are you going to do with that today? And it was interesting, and a good question to ask myself while working on the piece.”
Last season, Frenchie and Kimiko explored their feelings for each other and determined they have a love that seemingly goes beyond romance to a familial connection. This season, they’re still taking that approach, and Kimiko encouraged him to have a sexual relationship with his crush Colin, which marked Frenchie’s first on-screen relationship with a man.
Capone explained how the storyline came about working with “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke and the writers.
“When I started with Frenchie, in terms of me assembling character and kind of puzzling who this guy is, I had a lot of inspiration for some reason from artists like Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger,” Capone said. “If you think about it, all those people have a sexuality that is not black or white, it’s somewhere in between. They’re so beautiful for being what they are. On the funny side, I manifested it. I tell you why, because in the second season they brought this T-shirt to the trailer and it had this crazy bone bunny, a skeleton of a bunny, on it. I had this idea out of nowhere, taking a pair of scissors and just cutting it to a crop top. I ended up on set with the crop top and I remember Eric Kripke was on set and he asked me, ‘Tommy, you know, it’s a crop top? We can see your belly button?’ I said, ‘Frenchie loves it.’ And he said, ‘All right, all right.’ Maybe that manifested the whole arc with Colin.”
He continued: “At the end of the day, it’s deeper than that. It’s the writers and the story trying to give you another angle and another peep hole to see this character, where he came from, what his demons are made of. Obviously, Frenchie is a tortured soul that walks in the crazy world of The Boys that is controlled by the Seven. And to the equivalent to our world with media and politics, he’s an outsider. So it’s just another beautiful color to explore in Frenchie’s painting. I loved it.”
