Over a couple of hours taking photos on a hot afternoon in Midtown Manhattan and then finding a quiet local haunt for our interview, the actor smiles often, laughs hard, and seems to enjoy chatting over some refreshments and air conditioning. Butcher, on the other hand, only seems to smile when he has a mouth full of blood. Urban says he relates with his The Boys alter ego, but it’s not exactly something he channels in his real life. “I’m pretty adept at leaving the character at the stage door,” he says. “And I certainly don’t ever delve into it in my off-season, unless I’m specifically doing it for somebody’s laugh.” While he poses for photos out on the street, a few passersby give him knowing stares, including a couple pushing a stroller. Urban clocks them and gives an unexpectedly chipper, “Congratulations!” with a Butcher-esque twist of mischief.

After three seasons of building an audience, the show has gone from genre darling to crossover hit. It routinely trends on Twitter, and it’s expanding into its own cinematic universe. (There’s a live-action spin-off, The Boys Presents: Varsity, in the works; Prime Video released the animated anthology The Boys Presents: Diabolical earlier this year.) So it’s no surprise when someone walking by straight-up shouts out, “The Boys!”—the surprise is that it took a full 10 minutes.

As the show wraps its third season (and with a fourth already confirmed), we asked the man at the center of The Boys for his favorite stories from an out-of-control season, how they could top it, and his reaction to the people online fan casting him as a certain mutant bub in the MCU.

“What happens to Butcher at the end of the season is definitely heartbreaking and tragic, but those are events of his own making.”Other than Butcher, is there any character on the show, big or small, that you relate to?

There’s a few. That’s one of the wonderful qualities about what Eric Kripke does—even the most villainous characters on the show you can empathize with at some point or another. You realize that there’s a certain tragedy behind their flaws. I’ve found myself at times even empathizing with Homelander. When you find out that he was a little kid who was grown out of a test tube, who grew up in a sterile environment, and you actually think about that, you go, “Oh my god, that’s absolutely horrific.” And in that moment, you’ve humanized the character.

So now as we approach Season 4, we have a lead character who’s terminally ill. How do you think that could change Butcher’s motivations?

I honestly could not tell you. I do not have a crystal ball into the mind of Eric Kripke, but I’m certainly interested to see how this new life expectancy manifests itself in terms of Butcher’s behavior. I would be very interested to take the character into a new direction for sure. You never want to find yourself in a situation where you’re repeating yourself, spinning your wheels. So it’s important to me that the character has a strong utility, and that whatever story we do tell going forward adds something new not only to the world of The Boys, but to Butcher’s character.

“Herogasm” was the most hyped episode of the season and your co-stars have some wild stories from set. Were you on set for much of that? The fight scene between Butcher, Soldier Boy, and Homelander did cap it all off, after all.

I wasn’t really on set for the majority of the Herogasm stuff—I only saw a little bit of it. But the fight sequence at the end was intense. We trained hard for it and shot it over four or five days. Big shout out to John Koyama, our new stunt coordinator, who did a terrific job. From the response that I’ve seen, the audience really dug that fight. I think that’s something that fans have been wanting to see for the last few seasons, and it was great to be able to deliver.

Part of what made that fight scene so exciting was that the three of you stayed in one location. In a lot of superhero movies, the fight scenes become so expansive, with characters flying out in the sky and across large spaces. It’s refreshing to see three characters duke it out in small, close quarters.

Yeah, it was like a super-powered MMA fight. The room was even shaped like an MMA ring.