As fans waited for season four of Prime Video’s The Boys, the universe that Vought built expanded with last year’s live-action spinoff, Gen V. The companion series explores the fast times at Goldokin University, the premier college for young supes studying, fighting, and dying for a coveted spot in The Seven.
Show creators enlisted decorated makeup artist Colin Penman to bring this crazy world of supes-without-a-cause to life. We spoke with Penman during June’s ATX TV Festival about his early career and whose idea it was to make puppets bleed.
Briefly tell me, how did you discover this passion? Were you interested in television or the arts, and this kind of came your way?
Yes. Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be somewhere in film and television production. I didn’t know where exactly, but I was one of those Saturday morning kids who just sat in front of the TV and watched, you know, everything I could watch until I was kicked out of the house to go play.
I went through probably the usual things. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a stuntman. I wanted to do special effects at one point. I wanted to blow things up. But makeup is kind of where – was my start. And I’ve always played around with it ever since I was little with just, you know, blood, fake blood, and Halloween and all of that.
And then, you know, when I sort of realized — this was probably about 19 — when I realized that you could actually make a living being a makeup artist. And that’s where I sort of started my focus. I went to school, I started working in prosthetics and creatures and monsters and then sort of got back into doing more beauty makeup and straight makeup. And now, you know, I get to combine it all together in the shows that I do. It’s amazing.
You recently worked on Gen V, which I thought was a great addition to The Boys universe. That particular universe requires a lot of innovative ways to describe what’s happening in a scene. We all know the infamous scene in the first season with Asa German’s Sam. Whose idea was it to transpose his mental instability and violent tendencies through the puppets?
Well, when I got the script, I had no idea that that was coming. And they didn’t know of my puppeteering history as well. So it was, when the script came, I read it and saw the puppets. I couldn’t believe it. I called them and I said, ‘I have to do this.’ Because puppets, building puppets isn’t necessarily something that make-up people do. It just so happens that I spent some time on puppet production and puppeteering about 25 years ago. So, I immediately got involved and told them my history and they were great and then they started talking about this whole thing and the idea that Sam, when he gets stressed, his reality bends to puppets.
In a way that makes sense. Although he’s a college-aged person, he’s been stunted with his growth. And that’s the way he perceives things like a child.
And that’s you know, that’s the whole thing about that. That scene is you know, the few times, he’s been imprisoned, essentially, and tortured ever since he was a fairly young kid. Which is horrific. So the puppet escape, it’s an interesting way to show that violence, but it’s still, you know, when he comes back out of it, you know, we’re trying to keep it real, you know what I mean, as much as possible, while showing a bunch of puppets being torn to pieces. There’s that shot at the end of the puppet massacre when he snaps back and he’s standing there covered in blood. And it’s kind of like…wow, you know, and then you can kind of get reminded of what actually just happened. It’s a pretty cool mechanism.
How has the series stretched your capabilities to a new skill set you didn’t know you were capable of?
I would say, just the sheer scope of what’s possible in a short amount of time. So, you know, one of the first things we built was the sort of six-foot penis that we made, which, you know, I was like, ‘How are we gonna do that?’ And that was a bit of a process. We had some lead-up time because we started that while we were prepping the beginning of the show. But once the show began filming, the scripts come in and then it’s just, everything has to be finished on time, obviously.
So things like the giant ear that we made, this 15-foot ear, we thought, ‘Okay, how are we gonna build an ear in, you know, the time we have?’ And it just, the team that I assembled – my shop supervisor, Daniel Baker, he has a lot of experience building large things. Some of us, we’ve all forged and built large dinosaur displays, or museum displays and things like that. So we sort of had this weird knowledge of how to make big things. And then it’s how do we streamline that? And that’s the skill, I think, that we have to sort of develop is sort of a way to do things, and then it’s how to do it faster. But still look like an amazing piece.
I think that’s the biggest thing that I wasn’t expecting that we got out of that for sure. We have this seemingly insurmountable build, but we still get it done and it goes on camera and looks great. So it just gives you the confidence moving forward to bring it on. What do you got next?
Season one of Gen V and new episodes of The Boys are available on Prime Video.