Paul Reiser isn't too mad about The Boys.
The star joined the Prime Video series as The Legend in season three, but it took some convincing to get him to agree to the role after he watched the gory, inappropriate show. "I thought, ‘Oh, this is something else. This is really wild,'" Paul told Variety. "My 21-year-old son, who is really into the world and loves the show, I had to go to him like, ‘So they're on purpose being this disgusting? OK, so that's different.'"
He added, "Because if you didn't know, it would be violent and graphic and horrific. But then you go, ‘Okay, these guys really know what they're doing.'"
And while Paul hadn't even heard of the show before starring in it, he said his son and friends are "passionate" fans despite its brutality. "But it's so funny to me because that's so not my world," he shared. "In a million years, if you put a gun to my head, I couldn't create something like this."
Thankfully, all Paul had to do was play The Legend, Vought's former head of hero management—with some minor changes. "From my first conversation with Eric, there were a couple of things in the character that I didn't feel comfortable with and he said, ‘Well let's move that and take that out and put this in," he explained. "And that's a great environment to be invited to."
This is Paul's latest foray into the world of sci-fi. He also plays Dr. Sam Owens in Netflix's Stranger Things, which is in its fourth season.
The role is a sly reference to Paul's 1986 appearance in Aliens, in which he played Burke, a seemingly innocent man who turns out to be evil. Paul thought that Dr. Owens would be just like Burke because of the Duffer brothers' inclination towards nostalgia. "There is a very good reason for everybody to be suspicious," he told Vulture of his character. "And that was a fun thing to play—no matter how warm or accommodating he tried to be, he was up against this wall of, 'Yeah, we ain't buying it.'"
Now, fans of Stranger Things know that Dr. Owens is one of the good guys, but the intrigue was entertaining while it lasted!
Stranger Things 4 is streaming now on Netflix, with part two due out July 1. New episodes of The Boys premiere Fridays on Prime Video.