The Boys is chock-full of compelling villains. Jensen Ackles’ twisted take on Captain America Soldier Boy and the literal Nazi-turned-superhero Stormfront proved so popular they’re getting a prequel show. Meanwhile, Anthony Starr’s portrayal of the fascist Superman-parallel Homelander is consistently the best part of the show (even if not everyone is in on the joke). So when Gen V arrived as The Boys’ college-focused spinoff, the big question was whether it could conjure a villain on par with the flagship show.
Season 1 effectively sidestepped the issue. Godolkin University Dean Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn) and her quest to eradicate everyone with superpowers — inspired by a personal tragedy caused by Homelander — made her seem more like one of The Boys’ titular antiheroes than a truly depraved villain. But for season 2, Gen V co-showrunner Michele Fazekas turned to an actor with a lot of experience portraying unsettling characters: Midnight Mass and Legion star Hamish Linklater, who plays Shetty’s replacement, Dean Cipher.
“We were so happy to have him. We knew we wanted somebody who felt different than Dean Shetty,” Fazekas told Polygon over Zoom. “We wanted somebody who kept our characters guessing and always uncertain, and is always unpredictable. Hamish is so good at that. It’s like, I know you’re a bad guy. I don’t know why you’re a bad guy. I don’t know what your agenda is. You’re just weird.”
Linklater’s character lives up to his name. No one knows what Dean Cipher’s powers are or where he comes from. In one particularly bizarre scene from Gen V season 2, he makes a disgusting-looking protein smoothie while chatting with Godolkin student Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and then comes close to putting Cate’s hand in a blender after she tries to use her mind-reading powers on him.
Cipher turns the students against each other, persuading them that their self-worth depends on their powers, bribing them if they go along with his plans, and threatening them with humiliation and imprisonment if they defy him. He does it all with relentless smugness, quickly cutting through any attempts to deceive him even as he expertly manipulates the would-be heroes to serve his hidden agenda.
As Godolkin’s dean, Cipher focuses on pushing the most promising students to better understand their abilities and unleash their full potential. In the first session of his “Hero Optimization Seminar,” he makes the class fight Vikor (Tait Fletcher), a brutal hammer-wielding supe reminiscent of Skurge, the Asgardian warrior The Boys star Karl Urban played in Thor: Ragnarok. Just as Homelander threw his own son off a roof to see if his powers would manifest, Cipher’s philosophy is that the students will either rise to the challenge or they were never worth his time to begin with.
Like Homelander, Cipher believes supes are inherently superior to regular humans. He’s very explicit about his beliefs when he gives his first speech to the Godolkin students in the season 2 premiere, telling a cheering crowd they can’t trust humans and “race traitors” like Starlight (Erin Moriarty), who has become the face of resistance against Homelander’s rule. This take on identity politics is a core part of Gen V season 2, and Linklater is optimistic that fans will take it to heart.
“I hope it’s received topically,” he says. “The idea that one group of people is superior to another group of people should be in comic books and history books. It should not be in our newspapers.”
Ever since he interrogated mutants in Noah Hawley’s 2017 edgy Marvel series Legion, villainous monologues have become one of Linklater’s signatures, and Gen V is no exception. He commands every scene he’s in as he lectures students on their shortcomings and dodges their questions about his own background.
“I think I get hired because people think that I’m good at learning lines and I’m really not. I struggle a lot and my career has become torture,” he says. “Why don’t they give me the strong, silent type instead of the slippery chat-chat guy?”
Linklater got plenty of practice giving long sermons as Father Paul Hill in Mike Flanagan’s 2021 horror miniseries Midnight Mass. While he complains about the memorization, the actor would love to work with Flanagan again.
“I’ve only worked with him once. It’s weird that he’s broken his rule of always using the same people over and over again just for me,” Linklater said. “His writing is fantastic. That company of actors is spectacular. Why won’t he call me back?”
Linklater jokes that he keeps getting cast as the villain because “the hero parts were already spoken for,” but he says he loves the opportunity to be the voice for a series’ message.
“You want to be in shows which use genre for the greater good,” he says. “I think Midnight Mass did that in terms of talking about religion and addiction and so many other crimes of the human heart. [Gen V] is just grabbing the news by the throat and saying ‘We’re a part of this story too, especially for young people’ and I think that’s just thrilling.”
Gen V is streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes premiering every Wednesday through Oct. 25.
