[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The Boys, “What I Know.”]
With her new movie We Broke Up hitting theaters on April 16th and VOD on April 23rd, Aya Cash took the time to join us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night. As always, the show starts at the beginning and paves the way to the guest’s latest achievement, and for Cash, that meant touching on one of the biggest TV shows of 2019 and 2020, Amazon’s The Boys.
Cash joined the ensemble in Season 2 as Stormfront, the supe added to The Seven to replace Translucent. While there was a brief moment when Stormfront just seemed like a very subversive individual looking to shake up the Vought system, ultimately the show revealed that Stormfront is an especially vile form of evil. She was born in Berlin in 1919, married the founder of Vought and is a Nazi.
Given the nature of the role, we took a moment to look back on Cash’s experience committing to play such a character. One might suspect taking on such a challenging role might be an easier choice to make given the quality of the material in Season 1, but Cash didn’t have that luxury because she scored the role of Stormfront before The Boys Season 1 was released. “I auditioned for The Boys and The Boys wasn’t out yet when I auditioned for it, so it wasn’t a big hit show.” Cash further explained:
“It was a few months before Season 1 came out. They hadn’t even been picked up for Season 2, but they had to hire someone to play this role because they needed to build the suit on the body that was gonna wear it. So they had not picked up for Season 2, but I got hired. I went in, I auditioned, I did a 20-minute talk with Eric about the role, because I had been told already going into the audition, ‘Look, the sides don’t really say this, but this is gonna be a complicated role.’ And I have no problem playing deeply unlikable people or villains, but obviously this was gonna be something that needed to be handled with intelligence and was not going to be glorifying this character in a way that I disagreed with, but it would be in service to something. So after talking to Eric, I felt in very, very good hands.”
From there the suit building began and every two weeks, Cash would fly to LA for another fitting. As that process went along, more scripts came through, upping Cash’s excitement and her nerves as well:
“As we went through and as scripts came through and I learned more and Eric sort of told me the arc of the season before we started as well, I got very excited and nervous because it’s a big thing that they were trying to pull off and I hope that we did.”
Filming for Season 2 is one thing, but being right smack in the middle of the conversation as those episodes roll out is a whole new wave of pressure. Is that conversation something Cash could be part of or did she have to step away as the season unfolded? Here’s what she said:
“I had to sort of step away from the conversation because I couldn’t talk about what was happening and what was going to happen. I definitely had moments where I felt terrible that people might have been hurt by this character and seeing this character. I mean, let’s be honest, 2020 was an incredibly intense year for many, many reasons with the pandemic but also with a racial reckoning in America and I’m playing a white supremacist. So a lot of feelings were coming up and I wanted to be like, ‘Don’t worry! She’s gonna get hers. There’s no way that this is okay! No one is saying this is okay!” You know, I hadn’t seen them either! [Laughs] So trust that everything was gonna come together and that people were going to feel satisfied, and maybe there’d even be some catharsis around it and spark some discussions.”
Cash concluded this portion of our Ladies Night conversation by highlighting the great value of genre storytelling:
“What I love about sci-fi and fantasy, and I’ve said this before, is the best of it is commenting on the time that we’re living in, but you are removed by the element of fantasy or sci-fi that you are able to see things sometimes clearer because it’s not so personal. So I was hopeful that that would be where we ended up. But I couldn’t interact in the same way. Or I felt nervous about interacting because I couldn’t talk about it fully until the end. And it sucks to hurt people. There’s no enjoyment that I get out of like, ‘Just wait until I kill that [family]!’ She’s bad. And there are fun moments of bad, but there are also just, she’s disgusting.”
Looking for more from Cash? You’ve come to the right place! We’ll share another clip from the conversation tomorrow on her experience working on The Wolf of Wall Street before dropping her full episode of Collider Ladies Night on Monday, April 19th!
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