When Chace Crawford used to film Gossip Girl on location in Manhattan, crowds gathered to watch him and his costars bring the soapy teen drama to life. They cheered when directors shouted, “Cut” and swarmed the actors for photos against backdrops like Columbus Circle or the Plaza Hotel. For teenage fans, the whole thing felt exhilarating to watch, even in a city where you couldn’t make it two blocks without stumbling upon a Law & Order set. I would know, I was one of them. The impossibly beautiful and perfectly poised Gossip Girl cast felt like more than actors—they seemed almost like superheroes.
These days, Crawford knows more than most about being a hero. He stars on Amazon’s The Boys, a superhero satire that toggles between darkly comic ultraviolence and trenchant criticism of celebrity culture. And the series, which returned for a second season Friday, often relies on Crawford to land these tonal jumps as it navigates stories examining sexual assault, corporate power, and the grim undertones of our cultural fascination with all things superhero. Whether he’s sharing a scene with a lobster tank or a sensitive moment with a fellow actor, the 35-year-old Texas native projects humor, pathos, and frighteningly casual menace with biting verisimilitude.
The streaming service bloodbath of The Boys couldn’t be more removed from Crawford’s other most famous role, as Gossip Girl’s resident rich-guy hunk, Nate Archibald, which he played throughout that series’ 2007 to 2012 run. “I was really wanting to work on something different,” Crawford says of his role on The Boys. “Something to sort of stretch what I can do and show.”
The satire at the core of the show, which is based on Garth Ennis’s comics of the same name, is that superheroes are mostly awful people. In this world, the Justice League–like Seven are the crème de la superpowered crème. The team is led by a sociopathic Superman type called Homelander (Antony Starr) and owned by Vought, a nefarious corporation. Crawford’s character, the Deep, is another member of the Seven. He’s a gilled Aquaman parody who can breathe underwater and communicate with aquatic creatures but who’s otherwise lacking in crime-fighting-applicable superskills. He’s not a true sadist like Homelander, but he’s cruel and narcissistic whenever it doesn’t please him to behave otherwise. He’s a “privileged white guy,” says Crawford, “who’s very un-self-aware.”
With one horrible act, the Deep renders himself potentially irredeemable in the series’ pilot. After Erin Moriarty’s Starlight finally lands the gig of her dreams as the newest member of the Seven, she realizes that her global-icon coworkers aren’t the noble heroes they seem when the Deep forces her to perform oral sex on him by threatening her newly won job.
The assault itself takes place offscreen, but the Deep’s nauseating coercion followed by Starlight vomiting into a bathroom toilet are tough enough to watch. “We were there for like a month before, doing promo photo shoots and whatnot, so [Moriarty] and I got to rehearse it. We talked just a lot about blocking and how we wanted to handle it,” Crawford says. “I just didn’t want it to feel cheap.”
The second assault scene was delivered with a heaping portion of the absurd—and yet somehow it doesn’t feel cheap either. Demoted from the Seven and banished from New York after Starlight goes public about being assaulted, the Deep must adapt to the life of a C-list hero, which rarely involves adventures more heroic than attending water-park openings. Then he’s assaulted by a hookup who forces her fingers into his gills and masturbates to his cries of pain.
“I thought that should be kind of personal and vulnerable,” Crawford says. It’s a scene that illustrates the fact that rape is about power, not sex more clearly than most on TV. Sure, it’s ridiculous—the Deep is being raped in an orifice that humans don’t even possess—but that just serves to effectively decouple the attack from anything resembling normal sex.
For the scene, the production created a replica of his torso that allowed enough space for Crawford’s attacker to bury her digits into the gills, which were fitted out with technician-operated pumps that allowed them to move like the real thing.
“It’s super hot in the room,” says Crawford of filming the sequence. “I’m already nauseous. The whole thing was just weird. The director’s right in front of the camera, like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Scream a little more.’ ”
Anything this bizarre relies on a performer who can really sell it, which Crawford does again and again in the series. It’s a show about two teams: the Seven, and the anti-superhero posse of the series’ title, which includes former CIA operative Butcher (Karl Urban) and newly minted vigilante Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid). After his expulsion from the Seven, the Deep has no place in either, and he’s a character whose storylines could easily blunt the show’s momentum. But thanks to Crawford’s relentlessly engaging tragicomic performance, the Deep is The Boys’ most watchable figure, a man stumbling through the ruins of his life with the perplexed bearing of a former homecoming king for whom so much has gone so wrong.
The moments that Crawford shares with sea life are among the series’ funniest. One that sets the tone for some of his future escapades occurs early in season one, when the Deep attempts to free a dolphin as he tries to carve out a new activist identity for himself within the Seven. He’s making a break for it with the dolphin in the back of his getaway van, spritzing the animal with water to keep it moist and attempting to dodge the horny mammal’s come-ons when he brakes abruptly to avoid a police car. The dolphin goes flying through the windshield and winds up under the wheels of a tractor-trailer.
It’s a wild scene, and Crawford could tell that the director was uncertain about it. “Everyone was kind of like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,’ ” he says. “I was afraid it was going to get cut. So I’m like, ‘I’m just going to go for this thing.’ ”
With crewmembers operating the dolphin and shaking the van and the director sitting beside him, he threw himself into the performance. “I look over and they were just dying laughing,” he says. “I knew I was on to something, so I just ran with it.”
Running with it is very much Crawford’s style in the series. But he’s all-in without being hammy and gives a performance imbued with a strange, sad innocence. That’s a word that conjures pictures of curious puppies and bouncing preschoolers, and when he’s with his animal pals, the Deep has some of the endearing qualities of innocence, too. But innocence can also be myopic and self-centered, and this is what Crawford brings to the Deep, an often-malevolent innocent reckoning for the first time with the fact that other people—particularly women—count, too.
When I was a New York City high schooler, Gossip Girl was appointment viewing—not just on the nights when it aired on the CW but while the show filmed on location in the city. Whenever someone spotted the show filming outside the tony homes of Fifth Avenue or fancy shops of Park Avenue, we’d spend lunches and free periods just hanging around, attempting to sneak nibbles from the craft-service table and catch a glimpse of our favorite stars.
Used to their idol status, the actors from the show were unfailingly polite to our wild-eyed and annoying group of teens. But Crawford stood out for being more friendly than anyone harangued for selfies at their workplace should rightfully be expected to be. During our interview, I show Crawford a photo I took with him a dozen years ago, and he kindly assures me that he didn’t mind the crowds that thronged him while he filmed the show, and in fact got a kick out of seeing people gather round to take in the live show.
I ask if the pressures of being a Gossip Girl star—hassled by high schoolers, under constant scrutiny at work—seemed at all like being a member of the Seven. Crawford tells me that some of the show’s commentary on fame rings true for him. Just take the ingratiating-yet-ruthless Vought publicist Ashley, played with wildly entertaining venom by Colby Minifie. “That stuff is so real and on point,” Crawford says. “It dovetails with celebrity culture.”
These days, Gossip Girl is being rebooted for HBO Max, a project Crawford says he’d be willing to participate in if creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage made the call.
During and after his stint on Gossip Girl, Crawford appeared in films like What to Expect When You’re Expecting and the short-lived ABC prime-time soap Blood & Oil. But he’s been a bit slept on as a talent—which may partially hinge on the very qualities that helped catapult him to teen-idol status. After he won the part of the murderous Tex Watson in her 2019 Manson cult drama, Charlie Says, director Mary Harron told Crawford that he’d nearly been passed over for the role because he was too good-looking.
“I didn’t know that that’s what they were deliberating on, but I had a feeling,” Crawford says. “A lot of times, it’s like, ‘Listen, they’re going to go for a different look.’ ”
But the look that made him a credible teen star in his Gossip Girl days is perfect for the Seven, whose heroes are supposed to be the complete package—skilled, attractive, and marketable. Of course, they’re woefully maladjusted, and the early episodes of season two find the Deep still lost in the desert of his own misdeeds (in this case, Sandusky, Ohio) and trying to claw his way back to the glory of A-team.
In the third episode, the Deep is slipping into the clutches of a familiar-seeming, vehemently anti-psychotherapy religious group when he gets word that Butcher’s crew is hiding out at sea, giving him an opportunity to put his skill set to work. He rushes in on the back of a whale to save the day. And it’s not all computer-generated magic; the show really did build a prop for the scene. “We showed up to this beach and literally, they created this massive, full-scale whale. I’m like, ‘Wow, okay. They’re spending some money on season two,’ ” Crawford jokes.
Like the dolphin venture, it doesn’t end well—Butcher steers the boat directly into the whale’s belly, disemboweling it and depriving the Deep of yet another animal friend. And it’s not Crawford’s only big set piece early on. In a scene that’s almost certainly going to be remembered as one of the show’s most original moments, the Deep comes to terms with his unique anatomy with the help of some psychedelic tea.
More than anything else, Crawford seems to appreciate the opportunity to show his range that The Boys has presented him. “I just want more swings at the bat,” he says. “Whether that’s comedy, or doing darker stuff. Hopefully, it opens up some different doors and avenues into other things. That’s all you can hope for.”
