Jensen Ackles Unpacks Soldier Boy Wanting Payback and His 'The Boys' Musical Performances

Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Boys Season 3, Episode 4 titled "Glorious Five Year Plan." Read at your own risk!

Fab 5 Freddy may think everybody's fly, but does that include Soldier Boy?

After three episodes of teasing Soldier Boy's (Jensen Ackles) supposed death on Prime Video's The Boys, the fourth episode of the third Season, titled "Glorious Five Year Plan," revealed the truth, and it was quite a doozy.

A lot of other important things happened in the episode — including A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) revealing Supersonic's (Miles Gaston Villanueva) duplicity to Homelander (Antony Starr), which resulted in Homelander killing Supersonic to send Starlight (Erin Moriarty) a message about who's really in power, and Victoria (Claudia Doumit) blowing the whistle on Stan Edgar's (Giancarlo Esposito) corruption and giving her daughter Compound V — but it began and ended with Soldier Boy.

The very first sequence of the episode was one of the (quickly becoming infamous) period piece videos of Soldier Boy through the years. Created around World War II, Soldier Boy became a war hero and rose to such high celebrity, he began shooting public service announcements, acting in movies, and appearing on popular television shows — namely Solid Gold.

If you thought Ackles performing Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" was special, you hadn't seen anything yet!

Soldier Boy was a very special guest on an episode of Solid Gold that saw him take on Blondie's "Rapture" off the band's Autoamerican 1980 album.

"We shot several days worth of material. There is a movie from the '80s that Soldier Boy starred in that we shot an entire scene of. There's a a sequence where Soldier Boy is in World War II and he's leading the troops into battle. We shot the whole the whole rap sequence of 'Rapture' by Blondie on Solid God. Yes, we did the entire rap, which is long!" Ackles tells Metacritic about those "Soldier Boy through the years" moments.

Found this one on our VCRs... Solid Gold, with special guest #SoldierBoy. Find more good stuff like this on Prime Video X-ray. pic.twitter.com/RrTRxUi4xG

— THE BOYS (@TheBoysTV) June 10, 2022

While that performance was light and fun, if not a bit awkward (he was in full super suit on stage after all), things took a typically dark turn when the episode turned back to present day. Then, last The Boys had left the eponymous vigilantes, Butcher (Karl Urban) had already been dabbling in Temp V, which gave him superhero abilities for a 24-hour period, and the team was preparing to head to Russia to find the weapon that supposedly killed Soldier Boy.

Of course, Soldier Boy wasn't dead, though; he was just being kept in a chamber. 

This time around, both Butcher and Hughie (Jack Quaid) took Temp V, and while it protected them, when Soldier Boy emerged from that chamber, he was still in top supe shape. He lit up from within, releasing a ball of energy and fire so destructive it sent team members flying — literally. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) got hit by him and appeared to have lost her powers, her grave injuries were not healing on their own. Soldier Boy left the facility while the team scrambled to get out of the area and help Kimiko.

After decades of being in such isolation, he is going to want to track down his own team, Ackles says, but not for a happy reunion.

"He's not looking for them to to get them back together so that he can have his his minions; he's going after them out of revenge because he got taken by the Russians and was held captive and imprisoned and tortured for three decades and nobody came for him," he explains.

But while he's on a very specific track in this present day storyline, The Boys hasn't delivered the last of those pieces of pop culture history for the character. Ackles teases that there are "a lot of extras," some of which are being rolled out on social media, and some that will pop up in later episodes. His favorite just happens to be another musical performance.

"We did the entire Robert Mitchum 'Calypso' song and did an entire video of that," he says. "That one might be my favorite just because I had a hard time keeping a straight face doing that one. You know, cigarette in hand with a cocktail, and it's so ridiculous. I let go and I danced with the girl a little bit and it was just like, 'Oh my gosh.' And this was at a time when he was on top; he could basically do whatever he wanted. He wanted to do a 'Calypso' record, sure, Vought made it happen. Just so detached from reality at that point. So, that was a lot of fun to play."

The Boys Season 3