The second season of Amazon's The Boys released recently, and fans and critics are loving the adventures of the show's psychopathic mix of heroes and villains more than ever. Season 2 is clearly built on a larger scale than Season 1 was. Showrunner Eric Kripke recently revealed to CinemaBlend that they had to cut a full musical rendition of Starlight's song "You'll Never Truly Vanish" from the first episode due to the halt of filming brought about by the lockdown.

"I think we're trying to release it. We were trying, before [quarantine], we were going to shoot a music video. And we had it all planned, man. We had the directors, we were ready to roll. And then [quarantine] happens."

The song in question takes place at the start of the first episode of Season 2. The superhero Translucent had died, and a public funeral was being held for him, where Starlight, as Translucent's teammate on the superhero team The Seven, sang a surprisingly soulful song in memory of her fallen ally. According to Kripke, the scene was set up to satirize a type of celebrity culture where even a celeb's death is monetized.

"We wanted to do one of those big, stupid celebrity funerals. They actually have them in the comic book; it's one of the elements that we took directly from the books, of like these big, stupid funerals that are always happening. You know, where there's merch outside and all that. So the most difficult part of arranging that funeral - outside of just having fun and being like, it's an empty glass coffin and just the stupidity of it - was Starlight's song. We really wanted a real Whitney Houston-like fucking barn-burner, you know?"

What takes the scene out of its clearly satirical element and into the realm of something much more heartfelt is Starlight's unexpectedly powerful singing voice, which according to Kripke, took everyone on the creative team by surprise.

"Me and and a writer on my staff, Michael Saltzman, and Chris Leonard, who's our composer, we wrote this big song, and then we had no idea whether Erin [Moriarity, who plays Starlight] would be able to sing it. We didn't know whether she could sing or not. So I was like, 'Hey, are you up for testing out to see whether you can handle this song?' and she's like, 'Oh my god, yeah!'"

"And then I think she said something in passing, and she's like, 'It's so funny, I used to sing on Broadway when I was a kid,' or something like that. Like, what?!? Then she went into the studio, and Chris Leonard was texting me, and he's like, 'Dude, we are good.' And she kills it! I mean, she's really singing; that's really her. She's really hitting those vocal heights. It's fucking insane."

The Amazon Studios smash hit features an ensemble cast consisting of Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, Jack Quaid as Hughie, Laz Alonso as Mother's Milk, Tomer Kapon as Frenchie, Karen Fukuhara as the Female, Erin Moriarty as Annie January, Chace Crawford as the Deep, Antony Starr as Homelander, and newcomers Aya Cash as Stormfront and Simon Pegg as Hughie's dad. New episodes of Season 2 release Fridays on Amazon Prime Video. This news first appeared at Cinemablend.