The Boys Jokingly Wanted This Oscar Winner To Play The Deep’s Octopus Girlfriend

There have been some rather wild celebrity cameos on the satirical Prime Video superhero series “The Boys,” but one of them was almost absolutely out-of-this-world. Throughout the show, we’ve gotten to know a few of the underwater friends of the Aquaman-esque supe The Deep, played by Chace Crawford, and although they’ve pretty much all met horrible onscreen deaths, it’s clear that The Deep cares about them an awful lot. So, when it came time to cast the voice of The Deep’s octopus girlfriend, Ambrosius, theoretically the most important cephalopod of them all (sorry Timothy), the team behind “The Boys” wanted to get the voice absolutely perfect. 

But who would fit the bill? The character should sound sort of wise and distinguished, to contrast with the buffoonish Deep, and ideally the voice actor should be just recognizable enough to be a fun surprise. In the end, the always-incredible Tilda Swinton lent her voice to the tragically doomed octopus, although series creator Eric Kripke originally (jokingly) had another famous British actor in mind: Dame Judi Dench. 

In an interview with Variety, Kripke explained the rationale behind Ambrosius’s casting:

“For Tilda, we didn’t know her — it was just that once we realized that Ambrosius was going to be a character this year, we in the writers’ room all said, ‘We need the classiest, Oscar-winningest, British actress we can get our hands on.’ And that’s a really short list. And Dame Judi Dench was unavailable.”

Though Kripke noted that he was just joking and that he and the show’s other creatives reached out directly to Swinton, it’s wild to think of the woman who played M for two generations of James Bonds as the voice of the needy octopus. While it’s possible Dench would have agreed, as she’s not above performing in things like the nightmarish 2019 “Cats” adaptation, Swinton was absolutely pitch perfect as Ambrosius. Kripke went on to say that even though Swinton didn’t know anyone from the “Boys” team, she thought the idea was hilarious and she jumped onboard with no hesitation. 

Directing Swinton’s voice acting was “one of the best professional days of my life,” according to Kripke, though they had to do it over thousands of miles, as Swinton was apparently in Scotland and Kripke was in Los Angeles. The magic was there, however, because hearing “the highest-caliber actor of her level reading the dumbest lines” brought Kripke intense joy. It’s a shame that Ambrosius was just as doomed as the rest of The Deep’s oceanic pals; hearing Swinton on “The Boys” brought fans a lot of joy, too.