No matter what you think of how The Boys is ending its run, we can all agree that Jack Quaid has gone above and beyond the call of duty. From the first blood-splattered scene after A-Train ran through his girlfriend to the myriad ways the show has managed to coat him in blood, guts, goo and goon juice, Quaid’s Hughie Campbell will always be remembered as the heart of the sickest superhero show on the planet.
Quaid himself will be remembered for being one the show’s greatest ambassadors. Just ask any TV journalist who has covered the series in any form. It is not easy to be hooked onto a sudden hit that requires tireless global promotion and grueling production schedules — particularly ones derailed by a pandemic and two industry strikes — yet Quaid has remained a genuinely delightful subject, generous with his time, hot takes, and much-appreciated humanity.
Even now, as the show wraps up, he shows no signs of phoning-it-in fatigue. In fact, if anything, his appreciation for the friends he’s made along the way maybe at an all-time high after almost a decade of production up in Toronto.
Prime Video
“I’ve known these people for nine years,” he marvels shortly before the fifth and finale season of Prime Video’s hit rolled out. “It’s unbelievable. I know this is the biggest cliche of all, but they really have become my family. It’s really, really true. I don’t know where I’d be without them. I know I’m a better person because of all these people, not to get too schmaltzy.”
“I will be thanking Eric Kripke till the day that I die,” Quaid continues, explaining that the showrunner “really believed in me. I auditioned for the show a lot and he was the guy fighting for me and I’ll never be not grateful for that.”
A lifelong comic-book fan, the role of Hughie, a meek, mild-mannered everyman roped into the insane world of vigilantes battling corrupt superheroes backed by evil corporation Vought International, turned out to be its own heroic manifestation.
“I remember having this moment back in I think it was 2017, after I saw Thor Ragnarok — which coincidentally Karl [Urban]’s in — and just thinking that was such a great superhero movie,” he says. “And I remember saying out loud, ‘I really want to be a part of a superhero thing.’ But never in my wildest dreams did I think I would land on the ground floor of a superhero universe that’s totally its own thing, with its own sense of humor and tone and characters. And now that thing has completely taken off and we have spinoff shows and it’s crazy!”
Crazier still is that the self-confessed nerd didn’t even realize that Hughie and The Boys were cult comic-book icons.
“I just thought Eric Kripke wrote this incredible script about America and then inserted superheroes into it. But then I got cast and I realized it was based off of comics. I was like, ‘Oh, OK. I should read the comic,’” Quaid confesses. “And then I look at the comics and it’s Simon Pegg! Simon Pegg is Hughie. In the comics, the artist, Darick Robertson, he modeled the character of Wee Hughie, who is Scottish and five feet tall, maybe less, after Simon, circa [his UK sitcom] Spaced.”
And while having Pegg eventually appear on the show as Hughie’s dad “as a nod to that” was a huge thrill for Quaid, it was also “super, super intimidating because he’s another hero of mine. And I was like, ‘Oh, no, people are going to be so upset when Simon Pegg, amazing actor, isn’t playing Hughie and that it’s me’.”
Prime Video
What happened instead was that we got one of the show’s most emotional arcs and some of Quaid’s best work to date. In Season 4, Hughie gives his father a dose of Compound V to save his life after suffering a stroke. But along with his new powers, Hugh Senior also becomes engulfed in a state of dementia and begins unknowingly killing staffers and patients. Faced with the unthinkable (the idea of his dad being confined to a Vought asylum), Hughie Jr. makes the heartbreaking decision to euthanize his father.
That storyline, along with a stint on the toxic-masculinity side that threatened to derail his romance with Starlight (Erin Moriarty), allowed Quaid to level up and layer in new shades to the formerly aww-shucks character. Additionally, his turn as one of the killers in 2022’s Scream 5 and starring role in the 2025 action-comedy Novocaine — which firmly graduated him from “son of so and so” to bonafide feature-film star — tapped into his ability to play a darker energy that has been on finely calibrated display throughout this brutal final season.
Prime Video
“I’m playing Hughie with very little fear for the first time, which is really cool,” he admits of his character’s edgier attitude about good versus evil. Especially now that that he’s endured as much traumatic terror at the hands of team leader Billy Butcher (Urban) as they have from Homelander (Antony Starr) and his cronies.
“I had a little bit of a concern about it, but Eric put my fears to bed pretty quickly…I think the reason why he developed an edge was because if there’s a character that’s like a good person the whole way through and that goodness never gets tested not even once, you know what I mean, it’s like, ‘Well, OK, did he really grow?’ But if the world starts to corrupt him a little bit and he is able to pull himself back, that is an earned good character in my opinion,” says Quaid.
With the end in sight, it will be interested to see how the equally good Quaid carries on beyond The Boys. He already has a full slate of projects in the pipeline, as well as a script of his own in the works. But has he shed Hughie yet?
“Oh, it’s tough. It’s kind of like saying goodbye to an old friend,” he points out. “It is really, really hard. The thing is, he’s close enough. I don’t have to say goodbye, you know what I mean? He feels like he’ll always kind of be there. I don’t even believe the show’s over yet, really.”
“I think once I get to the end of this press cycle [where] I’m talking about it, maybe then it’ll kick in. Because I’m used to going ‘The season ends, we do press, and then in about a year to six months, we do another season.’ So, I think my brain knows it’s over, but my body doesn’t yet,” Quaid ponders before realizing that a delayed-reaction is most likely waiting in the wings.
“But I’m just picturing myself six months from now, being in the grocery store, trying to get a box of cereal and then ‘You May Be Right’ by Billy Joel comes on and then I just start crying in a puddle,” he laughs. “But the good news is, I read this thing where that if you’re in somebody’s life for, what is it, like seven years plus, the chances are tripled or something that you’ll know them for the rest of your life.”
So he’ll always have his boys.
The Boys, Series Finale, Wednesday, May 20, Prime Video