10 Ways TV Shows Blew Your Mind (Without You Even Realising)
4. The Dead Whale Is Mostly Practical - The Boys
The Boys' season two episode "Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men" features one of its most ambitiously grotesque set-pieces to date, when Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) drives a speedboat into a beached whale, brutally killing it and smashing its bloody carcass onto the shore.
Though the impact shot was obviously produced digitally, you might be surprised to learn that the subsequent whale corpse was almost entirely practical.
Indeed, a massive silicon and Styrofoam whale prop was built for the gnarly aftermath where the Boys find themselves caught up in its innards.
The whale's mouth and tail contained animatronic elements to portray its final moments of life, while the whale interior was augmented with VFX for its pulsating organs.
The whale took an entire five months to design and perfect, the practical effects team even building fully lifelike, anatomically correct guts for the interior, and creating a hidden backdoor to give the camera crew more space to move around.
The end result, of course, is absolutely spectacular.