Jack Quaid said goodbye to The Boys as the Prime Video series reached its fifth and final season and its series finale began streaming.
“I’ve known these people for nine years,” Quaid said, and he added without hesitation that “they really have become my family.” Those numbers matter: the production that began for him in 2017 stretched into nearly a decade of work in Toronto and, by Quaid’s account, close personal ties that now end with the show’s last episodes.
Quaid placed the emotional center of that goodbye squarely on his character, Hughie Campbell, calling him “hopeful, which is tough because things are not going well.” It is a blunt tension: Hughie’s optimism has driven much of the show’s moral counterweight, even as the plot moved toward darker and more destructive turns in the run-up to the finale.
The arc of Quaid’s own path to the role echoes that tension. He said he “really want[ed] to be a part of a superhero thing” after seeing Thor Ragnarok in 2017, and then auditioned for The Boys many times before landing the role of Hughie Campbell. He recounted a moment of surprise early on: thinking the show might be an original script by showrunner Eric Kripke, Quaid remembered saying, “Oh, OK. I should read the comic,” and later realizing the series was based on that source material.
That comic connection, Quaid said, runs deeper than adaptation. He pointed out a direct lineage between the comics and the show: “Simon Pegg is Hughie.” According to Quaid, the comics artist Darick Robertson modeled Wee Hughie after Simon Pegg circa Spaced, and the casting later acknowledged that lineage—Pegg appeared on the series as Hughie’s father as a nod to the comic’s origins.
Gratitude, not grievance, is the dominant note Quaid struck about the people who made the show. He singled out Kripke by name: “I will be thanking Eric Kripke till the day that I die,” he said, adding that Kripke “really believed in me.” For an actor who auditioned repeatedly and then spent years playing a character who was both bewildered and stubbornly kind, the gratitude is also a public admission of how much the job mattered on a personal level.
There is friction in Quaid’s public account: he describes Hughie as persistently hopeful even as the storyline tightens around catastrophe, and he describes deep personal bonds with colleagues even as the production prepares to close. That gap—hope in the face of decline, family love at the end of a long run—is the note that gives the farewell its edge.
Quaid also flagged the small, almost private milestones that shaped his understanding of the show. He said the production had been in Toronto for almost a decade and that by 2023 the project’s draft class of performers had proved “quite fruitful,” a shorthand way of saying the cast and crew built something that outlasted individual seasons or storylines.
As the final episodes stream on Prime Video, Quaid’s closing posture is plain. He is leaving the show publicly grateful and personally changed: he will carry Hughie’s outlook—flawed, hopeful, and stubborn—out of the soundstages and into whatever comes next, and he will keep thanking the man who put him there. That, by his own words, is the end of this chapter.
