Jessie T. Usher just reminded everyone that saying goodbye to a show you have poured yourself into for seven years is not something you can walk away from cleanly.
Jessie T. Usher says he genuinely struggled to let go of A-Train after filming his death in The Boys Season 5
Usher took to his X handle and wrote, “&& loved every mile!!!” after The Boys’ official handle appreciated A-Train’s “helluva run.”
The actor also opened up across a string of interviews following the Season 5 premiere of The Boys on April 8, in which A-Train was killed by Homelander in the opening episode, and the words he used to describe the experience made it clear this one hit differently.
“I really did love playing this character,” he told Nerdist. “In that moment, that’s what you feel. You feel the love that you’ve grown to have with these characters.“
As Usher described it, filming the death scene at 4 am on a sheet of ice in winter in Toronto was one of those moments where everything lands at once.
“I just had this breath, where I felt relieved that we’ve built this thing up and we cared about this thing for so long, and now we’re presenting this character’s end in this way,” he said. “I’m feeling it now.”
The mourning, he told Entertainment Weekly, was never really about the character.
“It was honestly just in those relationships.” He revealed he had kept the secret of A-Train’s death from his castmates for a full year, only telling them the truth when they started reaching out after reading the scripts.
“I had a hard time letting go of this character,” he admitted. “I had to sit down with myself and say, ‘Okay, it’s fine. We’ve done it. This is what we dreamed to do with the character from the very beginning.‘”
His response when creator Eric Kripke first told him how it would play out was immediate.
“Honestly, tears in my eyes. I can’t thank him enough for taking the time to have this character make these real changes and have these real moments that play out on screen.“
The death itself arrived as a full circle for A-Train, whose entire story began in Season 1 when he accidentally killed Hughie’s girlfriend Robin.
In his final moments, he swerves to avoid hitting a pedestrian, choosing someone else’s life over his own escape. Homelander snaps his neck.
But not before A-Train gets to look his former oppressor in the face and call him a pathetic loser. “He finally gets a moment to catch his breath after running for so long,” Usher said. “He just couldn’t do it anymore.”
When Antony Starr posted his own farewell to the show on Instagram, calling it the highlight of his career, Usher dropped into the comments simply to say, “You did a damn good job as Homelander.”
Seven years of shared screen time, and that is exactly the right thing to say.
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