Just when Chace Crawford‘s The Deep hits his lowest point in this week’s episode of The Boys, Samuel L. Jackson appears as a homicidal hammerhead shark ready to hit him while he’s down.
It seems the Prime Video series is continuing its tradition of having award-winning actors make voice cameos on The Boys, giving Crawford the chance to act opposite some of the biggest names in Hollywood in Jackson and, previously, Tilda Swinton, who lent her haunting and ethereal voice to play The Deep’s late octopus lover, Ambrosius.
But there’s no mistaking that Oscar-winning voice. Jackson appears in this week’s episode as a hammerhead shark named Xander, who approaches The Deep as he’s drinking his sorrows away on a pier and tossing his empty beer cans into the water.
Xander attempts to goad The Deep into getting into the water to clean up his trash, but The Deep is so wrapped up in his own problems that he barely notices Xander calling him out for littering in the water. But Jackson’s voice lends itself perfectly to the short-fused shark’s impassioned rant against The Deep.
“Shut the fuck up,” he tells The Deep, catching the Supe off guard. He accuses The Deep of being responsible for the “pipeline genocide,” which was actually Black Noir’s doing. “Remember March 15, motherfucker!” Xander adds.
The Deep insists it wasn’t him but Xander ruthlessly threatens him, making it clear if he even steps “one fucking stupid ass simian toe” in any body of water, anywhere, his life is over.
“On God son, you’re dead. We’re gonna kill you. You understand you dumb motherfucker? Water is fucking off-limits to you. You are dead to us,” Xander tells the supe.
There’s nothing better than getting to hear Jackson’s signature, no-nonsense voice put The Deep in his place. The moment feels like the final nail in the coffin for Deep. He killed his bro Noir, Homelander disbanded The Seven, and now The Deep is barred from ever entering the water again, cutting him off from his last source of community. The Deep has always been a self-absorbed megalomaniac, but Season 5 has shown the character lose himself even more under Homelander’s influence.
The scene gets the ultimate payoff later in the episode when The Deep, already faced with a ruined reputation, is caught walking away from a man who is literally drowning because he can’t risk getting in the water.
Jackson’s appearance on the show is just as impactful as Swinton’s in Season 4. Series creator Eric Kripke previously said they hoped to cast “the classiest, Oscar-winningest, British actress we can get our hands on” for the role, per Variety. Meanwhile, Jackson’s authoritative voice gives Xander a deadly edge that Crawford’s The Deep will not want to mess with.
The Boys is pulling out all of the stops ahead of the series finale, which airs next Wednesday May 20. Fans will get the chance to catch the series finale in theaters in 4DX ahead of its Prime Video premiere.
New episodes of The Boys air Wednesdays at Prime Video at 3:01 a.m. ET.
