Jensen Ackles has played many roles over the course of his career, but few have left as strong a mark as Soldier Boy in The Boys. After first being introduced in Season 3, the cocky and world-famous supe was put back on ice at the finale, only to return in Season 4’s closing moments. Now, as the story heads into its fifth and final season, fans are wondering: what kind of Soldier Boy will they meet this time—and how will he compare to the one we’ll see in the prequel series Vought Rising?
Ackles himself admits that audiences will be meeting very different sides of the same character. Speaking in a recent interview, he explained:
“Obviously, they’re the same guy, but certainly there’s a lot of life that Soldier Boy has lived when we see him in The Boys and when we see him in Season 5 — how he’s relating to people, the things that are important to him, the things that he’s willing to just slough off, his idea of the life he wants to lead.”
For fans who thought a short cryogenic freeze could change a man, Ackles suggests they wait to see what decades of history can do.
“And then going back 70-odd years to see him when he was really starting to get going, I’m able now to deal with the struggles that made him who he became, and you start to see him before he has necessarily the swagger and the gravitas and the life lived of 75 years of being the top dog.”
A Softer, More Uncertain Soldier Boy in Vought Rising
The upcoming spinoff Vought Rising will rewind to Soldier Boy’s early days, as well as the rise of Aya Cash’s Stormfront. Here, Ackles promises viewers will catch a side of his character that isn’t fully formed yet—one that occasionally reveals uncertainty beneath the bravado.
“I’m trying to show a little bit more of an early version of it — not necessarily an innocence to it, but there’s certainly scenes, relationships and character traits that predate how we see him in modern day, and that’s fun to play with. Now, that’s not to say he’s going to be a completely different character and he’s not going to be the tough guy that I think we know and love. That’s there, and we’ll get there quickly, but it is fun to show the origin of how this guy became who he is, and what were the little tricks and little ticks that crafted him into where we see him now.”
While neither The Boys Season 5 nor Vought Rising has a release date yet, fans can expect both projects to dive deeper into Soldier Boy’s complicated legacy.