Actor Laz Alonso Talks ‘The Boys’ Final Season & More with Rich

Laz Alonso treats Mother's Milk like the most serious assignment in superhero TV.

The actor behind The Boys' resident truth-teller stopped by the Rich Eisen Show on Tuesday with three episodes left in the show's final season, and the conversation kept circling back to the weight he attaches to the role. The best compliment he ever got, he told Rich, came from people who deal with OCD.

"They thank me for playing this character not as the butt of a joke, not as a punchline," Alonso said, "but to show that what they deal with on a day-to-day basis is anchored in true-life trauma."

This season, by Alonso's reading, M.M. has finally let go. The need to control, the need to survive, all of it. He is drinking. He is smoking cigars. He is freer than he has ever been across five seasons.

That arc, Alonso said, sits inside a bigger point about the show's allegory.

"It's a superhero show, but you don't need to have superpowers to be powerful," he said. "You can be powerful just by using your voice, by standing your ground and speaking truth to power. That's where our power lies."

He grew up in D.C. in the 1980s, named Doug Williams and John Riggins as his childhood superheroes, and called Riggins "the diesel" who ran over the Cowboys. The Commanders fandom showed up early and never left.

That brought the conversation to the franchise's current state. Alonso said he is on board with the Adam Peters and Dan Quinn era because there are "adults in the room now." He gave Jerry Jones a backhanded compliment ("the guy plays the draft like he's playing John Madden") and got there to a real point about Jayden Daniels.

The unicorn factor, in his view, is not the athleticism. It's the demeanor.

"His superpower is his even-keeledness," Alonso said. "You can't tell whether he's up or he's down. For somebody at such a young age and at the beginning of his career, that is as much of his unicorn status as his physical play."

Alonso credited Washington for non-splashy investments in protecting Daniels. He pointed to Sonny Styles in the first round and the offensive-line spending. He flagged the Bobby Wagner and Von Miller veteran-leadership question as the one real concern. His trust is in Dan Quinn to coach up two new coordinators, and he reached for the Andy Reid comparison: never lets the hand off the wheel.

The fun came on his favorite scene from The Boys. He grew up watching the 1988 movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He wanted, his whole life, to end up inside a whale.

When the Season 2 script written by Chace Crawford delivered exactly that, Alonso said it felt like God answering a childhood prayer. The production built a 75-foot animatronic whale on a beach in Toronto in summer. It was 95 outside, 110 inside the whale. Everyone got out covered in blood.

"We had a blast," he said.

The hardest question Rich asked: which Supe deserves to die most. Alonso, in character, named Soldier Boy because of what was done to M.M. Out of character, he picked Homelander.

His reason was simple. The airplane moment.

"That was one of those moments where I'm like, this show is off the rails," Alonso said. "If you want to know about the differences between what people think of the Supes and what they really are in real life, that moment right there. He's got to eat it for me."

The series finale of The Boys airs May 20. Seasons one through four are on Prime Video.