[This story contains spoilers from the Gen V season two finale, “Trojan.”]
In the finale of Gen V season two, star Hamish Linklater gets to do something he couldn’t do all season long: be the good guy.
As viewers saw in the season ender “Trojan,” and the penultimate episode “Hell Week,” Cipher’s mind and body reverted to Doug after Marie (Jaz Sinclair) healed Godolkin. Meaning God U’s murderous namesake no longer needed to puppeteer Doug like a meat suit. While immensely kind and appreciative to Marie, Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas) and the gang for helping free him from a decades-long nightmare, Doug was not long for this world.
As Polarity worked to get him to a doctor and treat his wounds following a battle with Cipher on school grounds in episode seven, Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) — from The Boys’ The Seven — landed on top of Polarity’s vehicle and drove a sword through its roof — and through Doug.
His death was ultimately at the hands of Sage, in an effort to erase any trace of Godolkin’s violent spinout. In some ways, Doug’s death signaled two tragedies, as Sage’s grand romance also came to a climax and an end over the course of Gen V’s season two finale.
That strategic love affair with Godolkin as Cipher in Doug’s body produced several colorful interactions between the two, who were building their own plan for the future of supes as “Homelander’s scheme was not sufficient to achieve the ends they wanted to pursue,” Linklater told The Hollywood Reporter.
Their scheme, as viewers discovered, was to use Marie — the only other survivor of a Godolkin experiment that also produced Homelander (Antony Starr), which viewers officially know as The Odessa Project — to build a new world order.
“He sees her as a tool,” Linklater says while discussing whether Cipher ever saw Marie as an equal or merely a means to an end. “We talk about it as if she’s the second coming. She’s going to be the Messiah. The danger of that, of course, is getting a Messiah Complex along the way. But he’s trying to encourage that to work to his ends. She’s his nuclear option. He’s just gotta get her to split those atoms.”
All that effort by Cipher-Godolkin also produced its own series of colorful interactions with Marie, Polarity, Jordan (London Thor, Derek Luh), Cate (Maddie Phillips) and other members of the God U gang across the season. Manipulation, threats, acts of physical and psychological violence (to oneself and others), as well as actual body snatching, were all part of Cipher’s brand while Linklater embodied Gen V’s season two big bad. As were those weird shakes.
To cap the season, THR spoke with Linklater about how Dean Martin helped him embody Cipher’s power, getting to also play the sweet character Doug, what Godolkin misunderstands about power and strength, who Linklater sees the Gen V and The Boys’ villains as in everyday life, and the experience of eating those very weird shakes.
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There’s a moment in episode six where Cipher reveals, in an antagonizing way, that Andre (Chance Perdomo) had seizures in his final days. Cipher bullies other characters across the season about their powers, but because of Andre and Polarity’s degenerative abilities, this underscores the eugenics behind his beliefs. How do you think Cipher defines strength and weakness, and what do you think he misunderstands about what makes someone strong?
I think he has your badly read Charles Darwin definition of strength and weakness. It’s all about the survival of the fittest and breeding upwards, which is always breeding downwards because it’s inbreeding. It’s not good genetics, it’s not good ethics. It’s the sort of thing that generally a villain believes in, or a, you know, president of the United States. (Laughs.) With Cipher, you could punch a lot of holes in his theories about strength and weakness.
This thinking also came out in the cage match between Jordan and Marie, which was positioned as punishment for Jordan speaking out during the rally. It was also a test to push Marie along in her powers. Which do you think Cipher cared more about, and in light of Andre’s fate in Elmira, was Cipher willing to risk Marie killing Jordan?
The match served a number of different objectives for Cipher. Number one, Jordan speaking out publicly brings the wrong kind of attention to the university at this time. He doesn’t actually want Homelander’s attention on what he’s doing. So he’s pissed, but once it’s happened, he’s like, “Well, since the spotlight’s on us, how do we take advantage of this situation?” Helping Marie level up by also stoking the fires of gender fluid hatred, which seems to run rampant in the university in this comic book universe, or at least in season two, once we’re in Homelander’s America. I don’t think he could have cared less whether Jordan lived or died, but certainly he wanted to bring the most out of Marie with her partner’s blood.
In that sequence, viewers learn he has the power to be inside someone’s body. How did you think about physicalizing those moments where he is moving between bodies? And in terms of those powers, were his eyes and ears not just cameras, but possibly also other people’s bodies around the school?
Sometimes with the powers, I don’t really know. I read the script and trust in the true superpower: the writers. But the opening number was my soundtrack for playing the character, the first episode of season two, with “I love you, baby, and if it’s quite all right.” That ran through my head during all the scenes. Then you turn it off and change over to a little bit of [composer Sergei] Rachmaninoff when you’re using the powers. But otherwise, it was Dean Martin time.
Godolkin is not just physically violent towards other people’s bodies, but his own. We see him repeatedly beating his own, and he stabs Doug’s hand while dining with Polarity. What do you think is under all that self-inflicted violence, and how did you film those scenes, particularly with the burned Godolkin body?
I choose not to act those things. I do it, I live it. So whoever is acting with me, look out. They better be padded up, because here comes the pain. I guess if you haven’t felt anything physical in however many years, then you’ll take whatever you can get from a belt or slap or steak knife. That’s where that twisted fetish came from.
His eating is also weird. Godolkin’s actual body is only able to eat applesauce, which makes sense in light of its condition, but Cipher drinks those shakes. What were they about, and what were you having to drink on set?
I drank those ingredients. I kept forgetting to pretend to drink the shakes and to keep my mouth closed. Instead, they would go in and I’d be like, “Oh my god, that is so much ginger and raw egg and random chicken. You don’t need to drink that, dude. Try acting.” (Laughs.) It wouldn’t even blend together, too. They would just do the noise of the blender. It was really, really shoddy work by me on that. The reason for the shakes, I assumed, was he wanted to keep his — what do you call it? — vessel in as good a shape as possible. And since he couldn’t really taste anything anyway, then why not just put the best protein or whatever balanced deal situation into his vessel as he could?
There’s a triad of evil that Cipher’s a part of all season, which emerges in episode six upon Stan Edgar’s (Giancarlo Esposito) return. As someone who had to play one third of it — Cipher/Godolkin alongside Edgar and Homelander — how do you see their evil, and how is it different among them? Who can take down who?
It’s like that moment when it was Elon [Musk] and Donald [Trump] having their scuffle: “Who do you root for?” Then it was like, maybe [Jeffrey] Epstein will come in and bring them all down somehow. Maybe they’ll blow up each other, but you don’t really want to root for any of those dudes. I guess you just sit on the side. You get your Doritos, and really hope we’re gonna win if somebody loses. That’s all I know.
You also get to play Doug, this character who is so fundamentally opposite of Cipher and Godolkin, and gives Polarity something really meaningful at season’s end. How did you think about that characterization and getting to play that as your end?
It was such a gift going into this season. Knowing that I was this kind of puppet, I was a little like, “Oh, I want to be me.” But then it was such a gift what was written, and the stuff that I got to do with Sean [Patrick Thomas]. They were like, “You’re gonna be this guy who lives in his car named Doug,” and what a spectacular opportunity to get to act these two totally polar opposite dudes. Also, what a great thing to get to be a sweet, sympathetic character at the end who also can’t forgive himself. I thought that was wonderful insight by the writers to not have a guy who lets himself off the hook for the trauma that he’s inflicted and been through.
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All episodes of Gen V season two are now streaming on Prime Video.
