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The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has said he wanted a Queen Maeve cameo in Season 5, but actress Dominique McElligott turned him down.
Warning! Spoilers for The Boys follow:
The Boys came to an end this week with Season 5, Episode 8 (check out our review for more). Queen Maeve, one of the main characters in the first few seasons of The Boys and one of the members of The Seven, was conspicuous by her absence during the fifth and final season, prompting questions about her fate. Queen Maeve was last seen in the Season 3 finale dealing with Soldier Boy. Her character was left without powers and on the run, leaving the door open to a potential return, but she never showed up.
Showrunner Eric Kripke told Gold Derby that he wanted Queen Maeve to make an appearance, but McElligott has largely retired from acting.
“I would have loved to have had Maeve. I was in conversation with Dom. We still email once in a while. She’s mostly retired from acting, and her schedule didn’t work out,” Kripke said. “It was all a very friendly, non-controversial thing. I was like, ‘If we wrote it, would you do it?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m kind of out of it, and I’m busy, and unfortunately I can’t, but send everyone my love.’ That was sort of it.”
Kripke issued similar comments to TV Insider. “Dom and I email a couple of times every six to eight months or so, and she checked in on me after the Palisades fires,” Kripke said. “We throw each other emails, and I said very early because I wanted to know whether we were building for it, ‘Would you be open to coming back for a day, and here are the dates.’
“And it was very pleasant and respectful, she just said, ‘I’ve kind of retired from acting. [I’m not] really acting anymore, and I’m busy those dates anyway. So, that was honestly it. It was a very pleasant, non-controversial moment, you know? But we wanted to pay homage to her; she’s an important character, and so she shows up in the recap and in a way to show that Maeve passed the torch to Annie, and now Annie is passing the torch to Marie, and that there’s this lineage of strong women that started with Maeve.”
He added: “We wanted to bring up Maeve’s spirit if we couldn’t actually bring her up in person.”
While The Boys is over, the universe is set to continue with Vought Rising, a spinoff prequel series set in the 1950s starring Soldier Boy, Stormfront, Torpedo, Private Angel, and Bombsight. In the meantime, we’ve got plenty more on The Boys finale, including fan reaction and a roundup of Every Major Character’s Fate.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
