SPOILER alert: This story contains spoilers from the Season 4 finale of “The Boys,” previously titled “Assassination Run” and relabeled “Season Four Finale” before Thursday launch, now streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video. This interview was conducted before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
“The Boys” actor Claudia Doumit is split (quite literally, onscreen) on her character’s death in the Season 4 finale: On the one hand, she’s leaving a show she loves to be on, on the other, her character, super-powered vice president-elect Victoria Neuman, got one hell of a death.
Toward the end of the fourth season finale of “The Boys” (an episode formerly titled “Assassination Run”), head-popping supe Neuman is killed by Butcher (Karl Urban) just as she and her daughter Zoe (Olivia Morandin) are seeking sanctuary with Hughie (Jack Quaid), Annie (Erin Moriarty) and The Boys’ crew. Neuman comes to Hughie after Homelander (Antony Starr) has spilled the beans to the country that she is a supe, and she fears for her daughter’s life amid how deep she’s gotten into the supe-supremacist’s plans to kill president-elect Robert Singer (Jim Beaver). Homelander also plans to put non-supe humans who fight against the “heroes” into internment camps.
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But Butcher kills her with his newfound supe powers, given to him by the Compound V running through his cancer-ridden body, by shooting out tentacle arms from his chest and pulling apart Neuman right down the middle. This brutal killing takes place in front of Neuman’s daughter and Butcher’s teammates — because he doesn’t trust that Neuman has truly changed sides.
“It was really shocking, but it was also really beautiful, and so well done,” Doumit told PvNew. “And most of all, it was a great death —that’s an honor in and of itself. I’m really happy to got a fun, twisted death, which is just such a great rite of passage for characters on this show. So I was really happy about it, which sounds like such an insane thing to say about being split in half.
“I don’t know if I was in denial or hadn’t processed it yet, but it just felt like another day at work,” she continued. “I’m not new to being drenched in fake blood, or pretending that there’s some gruesome thing happening in front of me on the show. The only difference that day was that it was my fake blood and the gruesome thing happened to me.”
Doumit said it was only when she went back to her trailer that the realization hit her that “there was no next scene” for her. “And it was this beautiful, bittersweet moment.”
Following Neuman’s death, which is a result of her finally coming to her former employee Hughie (whom Doumit says Neuman actually “deeply cares for,” and is “probably the only real friend that she’s had in her entire adult life”), her daughter is taken to Red River Institute. The Vought-run supe orphanage is a place of significance for Neuman, since that’s where she spent the early part of her childhood before being adopted by former Vought CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito). The tragic twist is in part because Neuman gave her daughter Compound V and super powers to give her what she believed to be an extra layer of protection in the world.
“It is truly, deeply such a heartbreaking moment, because all Victoria wants for her daughter is for her to have a life that was nothing like hers growing up,” Doumit said. “And Zoe, ultimately, ends up in the same place as her mother. It’s really tragic that she’s got these powers that were loosed upon her, she doesn’t have a parent, and she’s most likely going to end up in Red River, the same place her mom was in. It’s a really tragic, full circle ending to that story.
“I hope that there is some for Zoe at the end of the tunnel. She’s been through so much and she’s just got braces, so life hard enough for her as a teenager. But I don’t know what will happen there.”
While Doumit has no idea what’s going to happen heading into the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” and tries to “steer away from guessing” what showrunner Eric Kripke and his writers will come up with, she does have hope that there’s a chance Stan Edgar (who Neuman set free from returning to prison earlier in the season) will save Zoe from her fate.
“God only knows what they’re going to do,” Doumit said. “But Zoe is family to Stan Edgar, essentially. So I would hope that he is there for her in some sense.”
Speaking of the final season, Doumit says “one can dream” that “Ghost Neuman” will show up in an episode (Butcher is still, in fact, seeing dead people). But she’s just happy she lasted on the show as long as she did after being cast in Season 2.
“It’s actually really funny, because from the moment I joined this show, I knew that she was going to die — not because I knew for sure, but I knew what show I was coming on to,” Doumit said. “I honestly thought it would be sooner. I would go into every season anticipating that Neuman would die. So I was pleasantly surprised, and I feel lucky, that I got to walk around in Neuman’s pantsuits and Louboutins for as long as I did.
“She’s a wildly fascinating, and just endlessly fun character to play with.”
