The Boys composer Christopher Lennertz channels chaos for the Amazon Prime hit

Words by Sean Wilson

How do you solve a problem like Homelander? The anti-Superman, as played brilliantly by Anthony Starr, is at the centre of Amazon Prime's controversial, acclaimed and audacious series The Boys - adapted from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s graphic novels.

Along for the ride is composer Christopher Lennertz who has been with the show since its inception. The veteran comedy composer reunites with his Supernatural collaborator Eric Kripke who acts as showrunner and works alongside executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Lennertz brilliantly replicates the unsettling, unpredictable yet darkly hilarious feel of a world without rules where super-powered entities act without sufficient oversight.

We caught up with Christopher to discuss the suggestibility of chaotic music and how such an approach remains truthful to the show's memorably anarchic characters. We also talked about how Christopher's personal studio space, Sonic Fuel Studios, helps invest a greater sense of improvisational rawness into the soundscape for The Boys.

When you were first presented with The Boys by the showrunners, what was your reaction on a gut level?

Well, when I first started the show on season one, I remember I had been prepped. I'm dear friends with the showrunner Eric Kripke from our Supernatural days, and, even earlier than that, from college. 

I knew a little bit about the graphic novel, The Boys. I knew it was going to be shocking. But less than halfway through the first season, I decided to stop watching it in advance. So much of the audience's reaction is based on the, 'I can't believe they just did this' response. So, I wanted to retain that feeling when Eric and I first watched each episode together to talk about the music. 

I've done that all the way through the three seasons. I don't watch any of the episodes now until the time comes when I sit down with Eric and spot the show. And the first 11 or 12 minutes of the first episode of season three? [laughs] I said, 'Oh my God, what have we done?' That reaction is what helps me, at least, feel the feelings and gain the inspiration I need to write the gritty, tense, visceral music that The Boys needs.

Is that effectively translating an instinctive reaction into music? 

Exactly. With the first couple of episodes of season one, I knew what was coming. The visuals were so shocking, and I immediately noticed how amazing our cast is. How intense Homelander and Butcher are. However, by watching the episodes in advance, I was building up a subconscious impression in my mind. So, I really wanted to feel that for the first time when sitting with Eric, and that's what we've done. It's been super successful since then.

We're now into season three of The Boys, so are there any musical principles from the first two seasons that have been carried over? Or is it a reworking of the existing template? Are there any themes and ideas carried over?

There's quite a bit. There's the Seven theme that started right at the beginning of episode one of season one. Originally, the concept was to make it a very over-produced bit of Marvel music, which it is. But then, as we get into episode five of season one and Homelander crashes the plane, it starts to really warp. Even though it's this big, brassy theme, it goes out of tune and different sections of the orchestra split to become more dissonant. It becomes more out of tune as we mix it. 

We've carried that principle across into season three. We now use emotional piano and cello for moments between Homelander and Ryan, and Butcher and Ryan. We've also done similar things with Hughie and Starlight. Cues that start out emotional and somewhat sweet then warp and become really disturbing. That idea has carried through.

We ended season three with this violin theme, as Homelander goes crazy. That piece started with Hughie going crazy in season one. I've changed and done variations on that. It's a classical violin but played in a very sloppy, aggressive way. Having that kind of thing bend and go out of tune has become part of our world. And then we have The Boys' punk theme, which goes along with Butcher. It's very much a British punk, Clash-inspired vibe. That's obviously due to his grittiness and where he comes from. There are a bunch of those things that really carry through at this point.

The stylistics of a lot of superhero scores are now entrenched, particularly the idiom of the big brass to convey heroism and honour. In your work on The Boys, is there a desire to uphold that idea while also satirically deconstructing it?

Absolutely. The whole thing is a satire, and you hear this very brassy, bold theme that really is evoking Marvel. It then bends out of tune or even goes to the wrong note sometimes. The concept of the series works only if we embrace the superhero stereotype and then let it unravel. If you don't embrace it first and give it respect, the wholehearted authenticity, it doesn't mean as much when it unravels.

It carries through on music and certainly in the use of costumes, the names and the kinds of powers that they have, whether it be Termite shrinking or A-Train with his speed. The reason why all these satires work is because they start out very much expected, and then when they go unexpected, that's when everybody's jaws drop.

Yes, because in terms of the music, you're playing on recognisable iconography and that allows you to subvert expectations. It must be such fun to do that.

Oh yeah. It allows me to do both, which is why Eric and I love doing this so much. I get to play in the superhero sandbox that we all love. We grew up with Superman and Batman in the eighties and nineties. So, to be able to jump into what we love about superheroes, but then during the same show, take it to a new place altogether. We take it to the kind of place that a shiny, conventional superhero movie couldn't. It's the best of both worlds. We can have our cake and eat it and skewer it and mash it too.

I'm always interested when composers write music for material that's humorous, whether it's light or savagely dark like The Boys. I've heard from many composers that scoring any form of comedy is very challenging. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I've done a lot of comedy movies and I really do think it's one of the most difficult things to accomplish. To me, it's much more difficult than scoring drama. It's a tightrope walk, and the tone and the timing must be so precise. Otherwise, it won't work, or it might even make everything worse. You can really mess it up if you play over a joke or if you oversell a joke. 

I studied in college with Elmer Bernstein who, in terms of comedy scoring, did Airplane!, Stripes, Ghostbusters and many others. One of the things he did so well was he perfected the technique of playing straight against comedy. He then used starts and stops to accentuate jokes. Before Elmer's time, they would tend to make the music itself funny in Ghostbusters, it would be super-scary and when it stops and cuts, you're introduced to, say, Slimer. There's no music. Then when Slimer starts chasing, it turns into chase music.

But it was about overselling the seriousness, and we do a lot of that in The Boys. We'll build up and build up in a super-intense way as Homelander is holding somebody over a ledge or something. It will then cut away to Frenchie doing something ridiculous or to Kimiko making a funny face, and then we'll drop out the music completely. Instead of doing anything funny musically, instead, we're highlighting by pausing, or by building and then reacting. It's setting up the humour, letting the audience bring it in, and then reacting with them or the characters, but not playing the humour itself.

I don't think we've written one piece of overtly 'comic' music for the entire show. The closest we probably get are the songs. Yet even those are over-the-top in their seriousness, which is why they're funny. Like the boy band stuff or Chimps Don't Cry. Even those are done very seriously to make them funny, but no music has been written in the sense it's zany comedy music. It would take us out of the reality of the show and probably wouldn't work at all. Eric would be like, 'Nope!' 

You mentioned the treatment of Homelander. Was the treatment of that character pivotal to the ethos of season three? Did you use his character as a musical foundation?

Season three has great character arcs for everybody, but musically, the three pillars of season three are as follows. Number one is Homelander spiralling out of control. That means his superhero theme gets more and more dissonant and loses its focus.

We also have a lot of out-of-tune bells that started in season one with Homelander and Stillwell, as we discovered Homelander's mommy issues. The milk and all that stuff. All that stuff comes back, musically speaking, in season three. 

Meanwhile, Butcher is really going down the road with Hughie and becoming a junkie. It takes Butcher's gritty-Brit vibe and bends it to become very dissonant.

And then there's Soldier Boy who is a big addition this season. He also started in episode one with a very noble, patriotic, World War II theme in the movie when we're introduced to him. By the time we're halfway through the season, he's devolved into this horrible character with an out-of-tune synthesizer base and his theme gets warped in the same way that Homelander's theme does.

All of that is going on at the same time. The way it all connects in season three is dissonance, a sense of discomfort and tension. We feel like we're careening down this crevasse and eventually, they're all going to meet and fight. They're all struggling. Butcher is not even on the straight and narrow anymore. Even our hero is in deep trouble and teetering on the edge of killing himself with his junkie addictions. It's cool and leads to so much tension and dissonance.

The musical make-up you're describing is fascinating from synths to strings and bells. For each episode, do you mix up a live orchestra with synthetic elements? 

It's sort of a combination of things. Our heroes, as in the real heroes, The Boys, are really based in a world of what Eric and I would describe as a garage band. That was Eric's original concept. It should feel like a Brit-punk slash garage band with cheap broken instruments. 

At the very start of the show, some of our percussion was literally a bag of knives and forks from the kitchen that we would shake or slam on the ground. We've used hammers, pipes and baseball bats for percussion. Old, beat-up drum kits - that kind of stuff. I have a great team with me, Matt Bowen, Dara Taylor and Alex Bornstein, and we're all instrumentalists in our own right. However, a lot of the time we get together to play instrumentalists that aren't naturally ours to play. I'll play the drums and a little bit of cello even though I don't play either instrument very well at all. I just kind of make noise. It, therefore, sounds sloppy and messy, just like our heroes are. 

The actual Vought International stuff comes from a very real orchestral place and that we recorded in Nashville. We then bring it back and manipulate the orchestra tracks after the fact to create this dissonance and bending out of time and tune. The synths are also done in the box by all of us in a way that is still very much like the orchestra. I will print synth pads into Pro Tools and then I will still use plug-ins to have the pitch bend or to have it speed up or have it dive-bomb to the extent where it becomes growling. 

Those are the kind of things I do to bring all this stuff together. Even though there's an orchestra, plus what we'd consider garage band and synths, hopefully, they all hand off to each other and play nicely in the same sandbox. That sandbox is just chaos, in a great way.

It must be the ideal way to score a show in which good and bad aren’t so many shades of grey as shades of black. When you get to the Herogasm episode, I mean... wow. In the wake of watching something like that, are there lots of musical ideas flying around between yourself and Eric?

[laughs] Yeah, there's a lot of ideas. Eric is very good and sure of himself in terms of his tone. We've known each other for almost 30 years now, through so many seasons of Supernatural, plus Revolution and a ton of short films that we did after college. When Eric says he wants tense and warped versus lonely and/or tragic, nine times out of ten, I know what he means and it's about me trying to figure out how tragic, how far he wants to push it. We have a great shorthand. I'm super grateful that he's been so trusting of me for so very long. That helps a lot.

As a composer, that's the greatest gift. We all look for that, as in Steven Spielberg and John Williams or Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri. We all want a collaborator, be it a director, a writer or a producer, that we can work with over the decades. It means that they trust you to try things. A lot of the time, I'll tell Eric about a crazy idea I've had. I'll then try it and play it for him, and I'll say to Eric, if he hates it, then tell me. There have been times when he will literally email me back and say, 'Yeah, you're right, I hate it.' I'll then say get rid of it before working on something else. However, Eric will always appreciate the fact that I've taken a big swing. He'll often do the same thing. He may suggest bossa nova for a certain scene, I'll try it and he'll come around to the fact that it was a terrible idea. 

We'll do this back and forth. If you don't have a long, strong relationship with somebody, it can be scary to do that, but luckily after decades, we can take big chances. If things work, great, and if they don't work, then that's also great. Quite honestly, that's such a great place to be with a partner and a great place to be in a career. That's how you get a show like The Boys. If Eric and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg did not have the confidence and assuredness of the tone they wanted for this show, they could easily get bowled over by executives feeling nervous about something this bold. But ever since the beginning of season one, Eric, Seth and Evan have just put the pedal to the floor and put the gas on.

They keep pushing it and slowly but surely, the rest of the world catches on. It makes you realise that all along, they've known exactly what show they wanted to make. It just took all of us a while to catch up. That's what makes season three so great because you watch it and say, 'Oh my God.' It's not real, per se - I mean we have characters with laser eyes and stuff. But outside those details, it's pretty spot on at reflecting the madness of real life.

Garth Ennis created the graphic novel so long ago along with Darick Robertson. Then, Eric, Seth and Evan brought it into this TV forum and the fact that it is so on the nose, so perfectly set up for our time right now, it's almost frightening. The social commentary is exactly what we need to see right now.  They're so good at pulling the essentials from the headlines and working it into this crazy world in a very believable way. The talent in our writer's room is unbelievable and I'm so grateful just to be a little part of that. 

It reinforces how important music is when it comes to communicating complex, contradictory, intangible emotions. How much of a role does your own personal studio space play in the creation of the music for The Boys?

We learned early on that doing The Boys in the manner of a classic studio production, whether it be a show or a movie, was not the right way to go about it. Normally, you would write everything and then print it out on music. Then, you would hire the most talented, perfect, experienced musician you could possibly get to play the precise thing that you wrote, as cleanly and perfectly as possible. That will not work at all for The Boys.

Precision is our enemy, even in terms of instruments and recording techniques. Using the best microphones is not what we want to do on The Boys. We want to use the cheaper mics. We want to use the ones that we've kicked around and have a dent in them. I have an amp I've used a lot that has a broken tube in it. Normally I would fix that. But not until The Boys gets cancelled, because we want the broken tube. We want the chord that has a bit of a futz in it when you walk around with a guitar. 

A studio space allows all of that. You're not paying by the hour, and you don't have to record at any time. I can record whenever I want, which allows experimentation. It allows us to play whatever instrument we want, whenever we want. Often, I'll play something, and it won't be right. Matt Bowen will then try it, but instead of a certain bass, he'll try it on the upright bass instead. We'll then distort it afterwards using Pro Tools with a plug-in. 

And because of the way Matt's fingers move, it's noisier, and that's why it works. Or maybe I'll play something and since I'm a guitar player, maybe when I play a cello or violin, which I'm totally not versed in, perhaps it will sound more effective for a scary scene. Those are the things that have totally come to light with this show. Honestly, it's one of the things that makes it fun.

You once said that The Boys is the craziest project you've worked on next to Sausage Party. Does that still stand?

[laughs] It's neck and neck. And it's funny because they're both projects spearheaded by Seth and Evan. They're both so smart and savvy. They have such great instincts, and both projects come from that very same place in Seth and Evan's warped minds. Once you add Eric into the mix, it's so much brilliance. 

They're not afraid to try stuff and that's what I love about all of them. You know, 'Hey, you want a little superhero to jump inside a 12-foot penis? OK, great, let's do that, and then let's blow it up.' At first, you chuckle, but then you realise how much that craziness disarms you as a viewer. So, when you do that get that really important point about corporate greed or Nazism or fascism, your intake is different because you've already seen this weird, off-the-wall stuff. It's not that you've just been sitting in this dark, dour, serious show for an hour.

Even Charlie Chaplin did that kind of stuff. He would skewer stuff in such a way that this serious thing comes at you from a different place. You then process it in a different, arguably much more successful, way. That's the thing I love most about the show. The fact that, during a five-minute segment, you can literally go from jaw on the ground in shock to laughing hysterically and then mortified and sad, like when Ryan gets ripped from his mother, or when Hughie and Starlight break up. 

To be able to ride that rollercoaster of emotions, minute by minute in every episode, is just great. It's great artmaking in terms of what Eric and everybody else are doing. As a composer, it's a gift to be a part of something like that, to be involved in something that's a rollercoaster ride, one that's so funny and sad and poignant and smart and shocking all at the same time. It's amazing what they've created and it's a blessing to be a part of it.