'The Boys' cast reflects on the challenges of filming a sex scene in the air and the 'cathartic' experience of beating up bad guys

• "The Boys" cast appeared at New York Comic Con on Friday for a panel on the first two seasons of the show.
• Chace Crawford, Antony Starr, Jack Quaid, Karen Fukuhara, and Erin Moriarty shared behind-the-scenes details.

The cast of "The Boys" appeared in person at New York Comic Con and had no shortage of fun stories to share about the making of the hit Amazon Prime Video show.

Actors Antony Starr (Homelander), Chace Crawford (The Deep), Jack Quaid (Hughie Campbell), Karen Fukuhara (Kimiko), and Erin Moriarty (Starlight/Annie January) appeared at the Empire Stage of the Javits Center on Friday afternoon to discuss the first two seasons of the irreverent superhero series.

The stars reminisced about the making of the first two seasons of the show, careful to avoid giving away any details about the highly anticipated third season (of which the premiere date has yet to be revealed).

Insider was in attendance at the retrospective panel to witness the hilarity that ensued and the reactions from the audience, ranging from roaring laughter to "awws" of pity. Here are the highlights.

Quaid recalled being thrown off by 'The Boys' executive producer Seth Rogen reading Butcher's lines with him during his audition

"I remember I was so nervous, I was pacing around. And all of a sudden, he hadn't shown up yet, and I just heard his laugh in the distance," Quaid recalled, giving a dead-on impersonation of the actor.

"I had to audition for him and he's like a hero of mine and he read Butcher's lines. There's nothing more surreal than auditioning for one of your heroes and having that voice read like hard-core cockney slang," referring to Butcher's no-nonsense lines being recited by the jovial, often giggling Rogen.

"I didn't know what world I was in. That was a strange one."

The cast was freaked out by Crawford's prosthetic chest piece, which included gills and body hair

For most of the show, Crawford wears a dark-green supe suit. But during season one, he appeared shirtless in a scene in which his character was sexually assaulted via the gills on his chest.

In reality, Crawford had a prosthetic piece that was a replica of his own torso, "down to the little chest hair," the actor previously recalled during a conversation with Penn Badgley. The prosthetic also had air pumps so the gills could move and appear lifelike.

"They built a prosthetic chest for that scene and every day for like, three weeks, it was just sitting in the hair and makeup trailer," Quaid said at NYCC. "So the first thing I saw for three weeks every single day was a severed Chace Crawford-with-gills chest. It drove me insane."

"It was traumatizing," Moriarty chimed in, as Fukuhara mentioned how "hairy it was."

"That's when you know we're doing really significant, topical work, when you're de-stigmatizing certain fetishes," Moriarty added. "I would not be surprised if there would be a gill category on PornHub after that."

Fukuhara and Quaid are grateful to not wear uncomfortable supe suits, but they could do without being covered in fake blood that attracts bees

"We are always covered in blood, so it's always sticky," Fukuhara said. "There's bees everywhere, they're attracted to the sweetness in the blood makeup."

Quaid added: "There's a time in Toronto when there are bees everywhere, and they love us because we're the sweetest thing there is, to them."

The stars said that Black Noir actor Nathan Mitchell often falls asleep on set, even when the cameras are rolling.

Crawford said that if he could trade costumes with anyone, he'd want to be Black Noir so he could covertly take naps without anyone noticing.

"Nathan has literally fallen asleep in the middle of scenes," Starr said.

"I will say, there's a moment in season three - this gives away no spoilers - where all of a sudden I tap the person sitting to my left and Nathan, who plays Noir, is sitting in front of me and I just see his head going [Moriarty imitates head lulling forward] while the camera is rolling," Moriarty added.

Moriarty feels like her organs are being compressed when she wears the Starlight 2.0 costume after eating lunch

"After lunch, that bloat makes me feel like my organs are being squeezed," Moriarty said.

"But it looks good," Fukuhara said.

Moriarty previously opened up about the struggles of her supe suit during an interview with Insider for season two of the show, saying that putting it on "never gets easier" and it's mostly "a matter of patience."

Starr spoke candidly about his season 2 sex scene with Aya Cash (Stormfront), which was far more challenging than it looks, and got out of his seat to paint the picture to the NYCC audience

"You're trying to look kind of sexy in a sex scene," Starr said of the moment between the two characters, which involved them having passionate and violent sex in the air thanks to their levitating powers.

Starr said that in order to film the scene, he and Cash had to wear harnesses near their lower regions that "can be very damaging if you don't get it in the right spot."

Then, the actor got out of his chair and demonstrated how unglamorous it was to film such an intimate moment while harnessed in the air.

"You could see people on the ground just going, 'What the fuck is he doing? What is going on up there?'" Starr recalled. "And then we kept giggling as well. Me and Aya get on really well, so we kept giggling."

Starr went on to give an impression of showrunner Eric Kripke telling the actors that although they were having fun, it was imperative for them to focus and complete the scene.

"I don't know what kind of moment that was, but it fucking happened," Starr said.

"It will be in my nightmares tonight," Quaid joked about Starr acting out the sex scene thrusts while on stage at NYCC.

Moriarty and Quaid vividly recalled making pterodactyl noises on set when they became delirious from long hours of filming

"Jack and I are just children on set," Moriarty said.

"All we do is make pterodactyl noises in the background," Quaid explained. "We do this thing where we're all shooting, people are moving things around, it's like 3 in the morning and we're deliriously tired. We will just make these shrieks and see if anyone notices. It's a really terrible habit."

"They're really on point," Moriarty said of their imitations, as she and Quaid gave the crowd a taste of their pterodactyl impressions.

The stars also said that while filming the season two finale, they kept making the animal noises so loudly, to the point where an assistant director yelled in annoyance.

"It felt like we were committing a crime," Quaid said.

Fukuhara and Moriarty loved filming the scene in which the female characters beat up Stormfront on the season 2 finale

The satisfying moment involved Starlight, Kimiko, and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) taking down the evil supe as the male characters watched in amazement.

Fukuhara said she thought the scene was "fucking great" when she first read it in the script.

"For my character at least, I spent the entire season mad dogging Stormfront and I was so happy to see that we were getting the revenge that she deserved," the actress said.

Moriarty said that the highlight for her was getting to shout violently while rerecording her lines for the scene during a studio session, known as ADR.

"I had to do ADR for the fight and I got to spend a full hour of my life yelling into a microphone saying things like, 'Eat my shit, you Nazi bitch!'" she said. "I was like, this is cathartic. Who needs therapy? That was my favorite part, just yelling that type of shit into a mic. So I loved that. I mean, I loved every part, but that was the catharsis that I needed."