Season two of Gen V, the college-aged spin-off of The Boys that some fans argue outshines the original, is back in action, kicking off on Prime Video with a three-episode drop. And its new season wastes no time confronting the tragic passing of cast member Chance Perdomo. In the wake of the gnarly superhero show’s premiere, its showrunner shared how the team chose to honor Perdomo’s legacy throughout the show.
Speaking with Deadline, co-showrunner Michele Fazekas unearthed how the writer’s room went about handling Perdomo’s death. Last March, the 27-year-old actor who portrayed Gen V‘s magnetism-manipulating hero, Andre Anderson, died following a motorcycle incident. The tragedy led production of Gen V‘s second season to pause, allowing the cast and crew to grieve.
Conversely, its production hiatus gave time for its writer’s room to deliberate over whether they’d recast or write off the character, and they chose the latter. The show opened with a tribute that reads “For Chance.” What followed was Gen V giving Andre a heroic send-off, as he sacrificed himself to protect his friends between the events of its two seasons.
“I think we had set out at the beginning, because we sort of knew right out of the gate, we’re not just gonna recast him, and literally no one was saying recast,” Fazekas told Deadline. “Studio, network and everybody was kind of like, ‘No, of course not.’ So, we knew that we had to treat this like this character, as much as people have lost the real Chance, our people have lost Andre. And what does that look like in a world where it’s superheroes in college and a lot of ridiculous gore and funny? And so we just sort of made it like we wanted the season to certainly honor him, and then at the end, we realized the season is about him, everything, and all of the drive comes from him. So, by the end, I was very sort of proud of that, and I just remember being in the writers’ room and talking about Andre—cause we had broken Andre’s story.”
Fazekas went on to reveal that the Gen V writers originally wrote five episodes of Andre’s story in season two’s eight episodes, which they had to spike following his passing.
“We definitely did actually talk about it like, I think it’s OK to actually grieve something, cause you grow to love these characters as much as you love the people who are portraying them,” she said. “And in some ways, we knew Andre better than we knew Chance. Chance was in Toronto. We spent more time with Andre in a way, and it was like, losing Chance is incredibly unimaginable in a way, but we all were like, ‘Oh, we also lost this Andre guy we really liked.’ So, at the end, I was like, ‘Oh, this was about Andre,’ and it was about Chance, the season was. I’m very proud of that.”
Gen V‘s approach to honoring Perdomo’s passing carries an emotional weight that uncannily echoes what director Ryan Coogler did with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in the wake of Chadwick Boseman’s passing in 2020. Like Coogler’s film, Gen V interweaves the loss into its narrative, making Andre’s death the emotional backbone of this season.
Across its three-episode premiere, Andre’s sacrifice for his friends—killed by the Gestapo-like forces behind God U—is framed as a galvanizing moment. The show also doesn’t shy away from the racial implications of the character’s death as a Black casualty among the lineup of imprisoned superpowered teens. The memory of his off-screen sacrifice becomes a rallying cry, pushing both heroes and former allies to keep resisting as they navigate the dystopian nightmare of a Homelander-run America.
New episodes of Gen V release every Wednesday on Prime Video.
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