Valorie Curry has performed numerous characters over time with whom she had nearly nothing in frequent — a murderous cult member in Fox’s The Following, a paramedic who moonlights for the mob in Amazon’s The Tick, a cryptid researcher in 2016’s Blair Witch sequel — however few have been fairly as starkly antithetical to Curry’s private beliefs as Firecracker.
Firecracker, the newest mutant to hitch Amazon’s superhero satire The Boys in its new fourth season, is politically divisive, with extremist and sometimes hateful opinions on every part from vaccines and CIA conspiracies to the LGBTQIA group.
Curry, who identifies as a lesbian — she first got here out as pansexual on Instagram in 2019, throughout Nationwide Coming Out Day — ought to have been repelled by Firecracker. However her response was simply the alternative. “It sounds so gross to say, however I actually related together with her proper off the bat,” says Curry. She’s comfortable to play anyone she finds personally abhorrent, who’s “so vocally anti-trans and homophobic,” says Curry, as a result of “it must be anyone from the group who’s attending to make a clown out of her. So there isn’t any ambiguity.”
That’s a testomony to The Boys‘ creator Eric Kripke, whose work on the sequence Curry has admired for years. “The present satirizes a lot of what’s taking place culturally, whether or not it’s #MeToo or the Republican Social gathering,” she says. Curry admits a number of the conspiracies repeated by Firecracker appeared too wild to take critically, however when she requested Kripke about one outlandish line, “He’d inform me, ‘That’s truly a direct quote [from a politician],’ ” Curry says.
New characters on season 4 of The Boys embody Sister Sage, aka the neatest individual on the earth (performed by Susan Heyward, left), and Curry as Firecracker, who has tremendous power and might generate a firework-like impact.
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
The actress additionally tells THR she’s a giant fan of the shock bisexuality of a veteran character of The Boys this season: “I really like informal bisexuality in TV, in books, when anyone is simply relationship one individual and they’re relationship one other and we don’t even want to speak about it. It simply is.”
Regardless of a lot fodder for satire together with her character, Curry says she hasn’t discounted Firecracker’s humanity. “As an actor, our first job isn’t to evaluate our characters,” she says. With out freely giving any spoilers, Curry hints that “childhood trauma” explains a lot of Firecracker’s habits: “Proper or unsuitable, she’s somebody who believes she’s been marginalized.”
Curry is feeling the alternative of marginalized nowadays. She lives in upstate New York and is in a contented relationship with a girl who works outdoors the trade. She’s excited for her city’s Satisfaction weekend, however in all probability received’t enterprise past her native neighborhood to have fun.
“There’s a giant queer group right here for such a bit city,” she says. Although the large occasions in cities like New York or West Hollywood are tempting, at 38 she considers herself “too outdated to seek out it enjoyable,” she says with fun. “I’d simply be nervous about visitors.”
This story first appeared within the June 19 subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.