Jeffrey Dean Morgan and ‘The Boys’ Creator on That Kessler-Butcher Twist: ‘We Didn’t Want to Save It for the End’

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Episode 6 of “The Boys” Season 4, currently streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Welp! If you were among “The Boys” fans who guessed that CIA agent Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was a figment of Butcher’s (Karl Urban) V-induced-brain-tumor’s imagination, give yourself a round of applause and a frothy glass of milk as your prize after Thursday’s Episode 6 reveal.

But if you didn’t see this diabolical twist coming, we can’t blame you. “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke and his writers’ room decided to handle the I-See-Dead-People twist a little differently than the trope has often been employed in media: Kessler’s part in Season 4 becomes even more important now that you know he’s Butcher’s Tyler Durden leading into the finale in just two more episodes. “We were always going to reveal it in Episode 6 — we didn’t want to save it for the end of the movie,” Kripke told Variety. “Because now Kessler has this new role to be literally the devil on his shoulder, and really be twisting the knife and saying really cruel things to Butcher that all happen to be totally true — which is always great when your villain can be a real truth-teller.” The reveal in question happens at the end of the jam-packed episode, as Butcher is having a fight with Kessler about the ethical dilemma of unleashing an airborne version of the lethal supe virus.

Kessler is fully in favor of this, while Butcher is hesitant to do it thanks to the voice of reason embodied by his dead wife Becca (Shantel VanSanten), whom he’s also been hallucinating all season.