Jessie T. Usher as A-Train on ‘The Boys’ season 5 premiere
Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Boys season 5 premiere, “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.”
Midway through filming The Boys season 4, around the fifth or sixth episode on set in Toronto, Jessie T. Usher, the actor behind speedster A-Train, stopped showrunner Eric Kripke in the hallway. The actor wanted to know what the plan was for his character. He pointed to how the fastest man in the Seven kept burning bridges and backing himself into a corner.
“I don’t really see where he can go from here,” Usher remembers telling Kripke. “And he goes, ‘You know, honestly, we’re not really sure, but we’ll deal with it in season 5.”
A second conversation came much later on when the actor finally received the full picture: A-Train’s death would be the season 5 premiere cliffhanger, setting the stage for a real bloodbath to come for the R-rated show’s final lap.
“I’ve had a lot of time to process it. I knew what was gonna happen long before anybody else did,” Usher tells Entertainment Weekly. “I spoke to Eric about what was gonna be happening in the first episode with A-Train and what it was gonna mean for the show and the trajectory of the final season. It wasn’t until we got to those final days that I started to feel it.”
A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) saves the Boys from the Freedom Camp in the season 5 premiere
Credit: Prime Video
A-Train left the Seven in season 4 and went into hiding from Homelander (Antony Starr). He then popped in briefly on The Boys spinoff Gen V to aid Annie (Erin Moriarty) in building a resistance. He’s still on the run when season 5 picks back up with a two-episode premiere, but he makes a flashy return to save the lives of Hughie (Jack Quaid), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and MM (Laz Alonso), and bust them out of a “Freedom Camp.”
The act of defiance sparks a high-speed chase between A-Train and Homelander, with a nod to the character’s very first appearance on The Boys. Rather than running straight through an innocent civilian, as he once did to Hughie’s girlfriend while he was hopped up on Compound V, he dodges a young woman, even though it means he’ll stumble and get caught by Homelander.
“He finally gets a moment to catch his breath after running for so long,” Usher says, referring to how A-Train stands up to Homelander before getting his neck snapped. “He just couldn’t do it anymore.”
Hearing about his character’s death “was the worst,” the actor admits, while describing the act of reading it in the scripts as a more technical experience. Filming it was more emotional; there came the realization that he wouldn’t be joining the crew, some of which have stuck around since season 1, to see The Boys through to the very end.
Susan Heyward (Sister Sage), Jessie T. Usher (A-Train) on ‘The Boys’ season 4
Credit: Amazon Prime
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“The mourning,” Usher says, “was honestly just in those relationships.”
“It’s been an incredible ride,” he continues. “I never thought that A- Train would have enough time in the series to truly redeem himself. I always felt either his heart troubles or the fact that he was severing relationships left and right was gonna catch up to him. But somehow we got him all the way through. I just think it’s beautiful. The ending was poetic, and I couldn’t have written up a better ending for him myself.”
New episodes of The Boys‘ final season will continue to drop Wednesdays on Prime Video.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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