10 Best Cameos On The Boys, Ranked

From skewering the rise of megacorporations in all walks of daily life to espousing the dangers of celebrity worship, “The Boys” frequently targeted the world that we live in. To reflect those themes the show featured a number of major cameos across the main series’ five-season run. This ranged from public personalities playing exaggerated versions of themselves, often to comedic effect, or characters playing against type for the respective actor’s usual work. Even series creator Eric Kripke got in on the fun, with a stealth cameo in the pivotal episode “Herogasm,” albeit off-screen.

“The Boys” had a knack for celebrity cameos right from its series premiere and that tradition fortunately never overstayed its welcome. With that said, there are some cameos and brief guest appearances that stand out above the rest. These appearances not only elevate the material but don’t distract from the episodes themselves overall. These are the 10 best cameos on “The Boys” ranked, each underscoring the real-world satire of it all.

Let’s face it, if there ever was an American late night talk show host that was going to glaze up the Seven, it was going to be Jimmy Fallon. In “The Boys” series premiere episode, “The Name of the Game,” Fallon appears as himself hosting his usual talk show. His guest is Translucent (Alex Hassell), in a rare visible appearance, one of the heroes on the world’s most celebrated team, the Seven. In a broadcast watched by Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), Fallon praises Translucent while learning about his weakness to electricity.

Jimmy Fallon’s appearance in the series premiere illustrates the widespread adulation and hero worship that the Seven receive. That the broadcast happens to be playing while Hughie is still reeling from the loss of his girlfriend to a member of the Seven underscores his simmering resentment towards them. This would pay off later in the season, with Hughie ultimately being the one to kill Translucent in one of the debut season’s most memorable moments. Firmly establishing “The Boys” in a facsimile of our world, Jimmy Fallon rolls out the red carpet for the conniving superheroes.

“The Boys” Season 2 premiere episode, “The Big Ride,” delves right into the fallout of the preceding season, with Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and his team on the run. Detailing Butcher’s presumed notoriety is Chris Hansen, on a fictional true crime show “A Closer Look with Chris Hansen.” 

In this program, Hansen presents Butcher as the murderer of Vought International executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), who was actually killed by Homelander (Antony Starr) in the Season 1 finale. The clip contains a dramatized reenactment of Stillwell’s killing, complete with an actor playing Butcher with a hilariously exaggerated British accent.

If there was ever a television host to lend legitimacy that Butcher is a wanted criminal, it’s hard to top Chris Hansen. The appearance underscores the extent of the corporate smear campaign that Vought has launched against the Boys while covering up Homelander’s murderous activities. 

Chris Hansen isn’t the only television news personality to make a cameo appearance in “The Boys” Season 2. Katie Couric similarly has her own cameo, albeit under much pleasanter circumstances, in the season’s fifth episode “We Gotta Go Now.” Couric appears in a news segment covering the surprise marriage of the Deep (Chace Crawford) to a woman named Cassandra Schwartz (Katy Breier). The apparently happy couple speak to Couric detailing their sudden and convenient whirlwind courtship, who is unaware that the marriage is arranged by the cult, the Church of the Collective.

Katie Couric’s cameo underscores how superficial and saccharine the love story is between the Deep and Cassandra. The clip even maintains the hazy, dream-like cinematography that celebrity couple puff pieces normally employ to heighten the satire of it all. The couple is all smiles for the cameras and the iconic television personality, but audiences know there’s already trouble under the surface. The clip demonstrates how far the aquatic Supe is willing to go to rehabilitate his public image after being exposed as a sexual predator in preceding episodes.

With the Seven widely revered as modern celebrities, “The Boys” feature several in-universe multimedia dramatizations of their exploits. To underscore this distinction, “The Boys” Season 3 kicks off with an A-list cameo in the season premiere “Payback.” The season opens with a big-budget in-universe movie “Dawn of the Seven,” with most of the Seven’s heroes playing themselves. The major exception is Stormfront, after the Supe’s Nazi history is exposed, with the character recast by Charlize Theron, with the actual actor playing herself.

“Dawn of the Seven” skewers much of filmmaker Zack Snyder’s work with DC Comics characters, right down to reflecting the title of 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” With a visibly unimpressed Homelander watching the premiere, the movie also echoes the stylishly dusty cinematography, while the characters talk about the production featuring a costly director’s cut. Theron helps sell the Hollywood spectacle, delivering an appropriately exaggerated performance as Stormfront as the movie takes heavy creative license with the Seven’s actions. A cheeky and corporately repackaged recap of what happened to Stormfront, Theron’s cameo raises the Hollywood bar for celebrity appearances on the show.

“The Boys” Season 4 featured its own Hollywood production highlighting the Seven, with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) getting his own award season-positioned biopic. Throughout the fourth season, the Supe is filming the drama “Training A-Train,” directed by “Dawn of the Seven” helmer Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne). Playing the future hero’s inspirational mentor Coach Brink is Will Ferrell, debuting in the episode “Life Among the Septics.” Ferrell is occasionally seen worrying about how he’s coming off between takes, though he’s easily placated by reassurances from Bourke.

Ferrell actually appears as himself in four different episodes throughout Season 4 though only ever briefly each time. The in-universe film sequences themselves feature the hazy cinematography best suited for a Hallmark movie, with Ferrell and Bourke both directly comparing the production to 2009’s “The Blind Side.” These segments provide a break from the intense antics going on in a given episode, though Ferrell doesn’t overplay his needy actor schtick. Never overstaying his welcome, Ferrell makes for an oddly organic and downright memorable inclusion on “The Boys.”

Even with its reputation, the Season 3 episode “Herogasm” is one of the most sexually graphic hours of mainstream television ever. But before the rampant nudity and super-powered debauchery, the episode opens with a parody of Gal Gadot’s notorious star-studded cover of “Imagine” during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. The Deep organizes a similar celebrity-led rendition of “Imagine,” this time in support of recent violent incidents involving Supes. The video includes Patton Oswalt, Josh Gad, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Elizabeth Banks, Kumail Nanjiani, Aisha Tyler, and Rose Byrne, all playing themselves.

With Gadot’s “Imagine” video being so widely maligned upon its debut, it served as easy pickings for “The Boys.” The Deep, the most overtly clueless member of the Seven, makes for the most logical choice for hosting this parody, with Crawford continuing to deliver the buffoonish gags. From the celebrities that appear, Oswalt had also previously cameoed in Season 2 as the hallucinated voice of the Deep’s gills. 

Another recurring cameo in “The Boys” Season 4, albeit in a voiceover role, is another Academy Award winner, Tilda Swinton. Given the Deep’s sexual proclivities involving sea life, especially cephalopods, Swinton plays the aquatic Supe’s clandestine octopus lover Ambrosius. After the octopus debuts in the third season, Swinton starts voicing the character in the Season 4 premiere, “Department of Dirty Tricks.” When Ambrosius confronts the Deep about having an affair with Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), he angrily breaks her water tank and allows her to suffocate in the episode “The Insider.”

Crawford revealed that Swinton jumped at the chance to play Ambrosius, voicing the octopus in three episodes and bringing her usual gravitas to such a ridiculous role. Interestingly, Ambrosius’ death plays a surprisingly important role in determining the untimely end of the Deep, albeit in the following season. In “The Boys” series finale, the Deep is killed by hostile sea life that are aware that he murdered one of their own. What started out as a wacky gag involving a true thespian paid off with the gruesome end of one of the show’s big antagonists.

“The Boys” had room for one more celebrity cameo-filled episode in its fifth and final season with “One-Shots.” With Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Homelander determined to get a rare compound known as V1, the father-son duo arrive at the mansion of speedster Supe Mister Marathon (Jared Padalecki). The two’s visit interrupts a drug-fueled poker game hosted by Marathon consisting of Seth Rogen, Will Forte, Kumail Nanjiani, and Christopher Mintz-Platz. After Marathon tries to catch Soldier Boy, he turns each of the visiting celebrities into a visceral mess, going as far as to accidentally bisect Rogen after running into him.

Rogen actually appeared sporadically as a particularly depraved version of himself in the first three seasons of “The Boys.” “One-Shots” brings that arc to a gory conclusion with a bunch of his friends played for gruesome slapstick laughs. Seeing the panicked celebrities bicker among themselves when the notoriously authoritarian Homelander and Soldier Boy come calling provides nothing but bloody fun and mayhem.

Speaking of vengeful sea life, Samuel L. Jackson lends his own signature voice to bring a disgruntled shark to life. Much of “The Boys” Season 5 involves a feud between the Deep and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) as the two’s individual ambitions and interests clash. This culminates in Black Noir causing a massive oil spill resulting in the death of millions of local aquatic life. In the episode “The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother’s Milk,” the Deep is confronted by a hammerhead shark named Xander who blames him for the disaster.

As with Ambrosius, Jackson’s sharky voiceover cameo seems like a goofy joke trading on an established actor’s reputation. If there’s someone who can sell a shark sternly warning a dim-witted Supe to avoid the water under penalty of death, Jackson makes that brief role work. This cameo does ultimately foreshadow the Deep’s fate when Annie January (Erin Moriarty) launches him into the ocean during their big showdown, leading to his death. At once a funny cameo and setting up the Deep’s grisly end, Samuel L. Jackson continues to be a man of his word, even aquatically.

Though they appear alongside Rogen and the other ill-fated celebrities in “One-Shots,” Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins really deserve their own entry. For starters, the two play characters other than themselves as “The Boys” sets up a “Supernatural” reunion between Padalecki, Collins, and Ackles. Padalecki plays the lethally fast Mister Marathon while Collins plays the toxic Supe Malchemical, with the duo turning on Homelander and trying to get Soldier Boy to join them. Instead, Soldier Boy snaps Malchemical’s neck before brutally interrogating Marathon, breaking both his legs before he is finished off by Homelander.

The bananas “Supernatural” reunion with Jensen Ackles at its center completely subverts the camaraderie shared by the three actors in real life and with their prior characters. Mister Marathon is the most unhinged role that Padalecki has played and seeing him panic after his betrayal of Homelander falls apart provides the episode with so much fun. For “Supernatural” fans who adored Dean Winchester and Castiel, seeing Ackles’ character kill Collins’ Supe with his bare hands is another treat. The type of sadistically self-aware comedy that “The Boys” excels at, Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins are the biggest highlight in an uneven final season.