Gen V’s Cast & Crew Reveal How Season 2 Honors Chance Perdomo
“The whole drive of the season is about honoring him.”
The second season of Prime Video’s Gen V has arrived, but it’s missing some familiar faces. The last time we saw our college-age superheroes from The Boys universe in 2023, Marie (Jaz Sinclair), Emma (Lizze Broadway), Andre (Chance Perdomo), and Jordan (London Thor and Derek Luh) were captured by Vought and imprisoned in a doorless cell.
When Season 2 picks up, the Guardians of Godolkin make their return to God U alongside Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam Riordan (Asa Germann), but some former cast members are gone. Patrick Schwarzenegger, who appeared in Season 1 as Luke Riordan, aka Golden Boy, was too busy checking into The White Lotus to appear in any flashbacks this season. He told ScreenRant, “We were actually filming White Lotus at the same time that they were filming Gen V, so it didn’t work out.” Despite his character’s death, Schwarzenegger isn’t saying a future at Godolkin is out of the question, though. “Maybe Season 3 or some other time,” he shared.
We just wanted to be true to the character, honor the person, and do it in a way that didn’t feel like we were exploiting it.
The more glaring absence is Perdomo. The 27-year-old actor died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident just before filming for Season 2 began in 2024. Instead of recasting the character of Andre, the Gen V creators chose to rewrite the episodes to incorporate Andre’s death into the series.
At the Season 2 premiere in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, the show’s cast and crew spoke about how they wanted to honor Perdomo. Showrunner Michele Fazekas tells Elite Daily, “We just wanted to be true to the character, honor the person, and do it in a way that didn’t feel like we were exploiting it.” She continues, “I think we were successful in that, I’m very proud of it. And we wanted to make sure that everyone knew that, in some ways, the whole drive of the season is about honoring him, which I love.”
Before the screening, Fazekas shares that both Sony and Amazon Studios gave the cast and crew time to grieve Perdomo and worked with the late actor’s family to make sure they could continue the show in a respectful way. Phillips, who played Perdomo’s on-screen love interest, says on the red carpet, “Grief is really interesting in the way that it comes up. You’re in shock. You just can’t plan any of this. All you have to do is just let yourself be whatever you’re going to be.” She says the way she wanted to honor Perdomo this season was by “not being afraid to feel all the things that I was feeling.”
I wanted him to matter so that we didn’t just blow past it. The characters really had to reckon with the loss of somebody really strong, noble, and important.
“It’s such an indescribable tragedy, and my heart just goes out to his family, because at the end of the day, we’re just making a TV show,” says Eric Kripke, Gen V’s executive producer. “I just wanted to honor him as best we could. I wanted to make the character a hero. And I wanted him to matter so that we didn’t just blow past it. The characters really had to reckon with the loss of somebody really strong, noble, and important.”
According to Kripke, “The best we could do was just present him as the hero that his character was and the amazing person that he was.”
The first three episodes of Gen V Season 2 launched Sept. 17, with new episodes dropping weekly until Oct. 22.
