The last time The Boys staged a full song-and-dance production number (Season 4’s “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas”), it wound up winning the Emmy Award for Best Music & Lyrics. Now, lightning could strike twice for the Prime Video anti-superhero show thanks to Season 5’s “Raise Him Up,” co-written by Daveed Diggs (who also performs) and Christopher Lennertz (who also composes).
“Receiving the Emmy nomination, for me, was really thrilling,” Diggs tells Gold Derby. “I love this song a lot and it was so much fun to work on. … It’s all icing on the cake.”
Lennertz agrees that “fun” is the key to the song’s success: “So many times [showrunner Eric Kripke] said to me about all these songs, ‘I can’t believe they let us do this,’ and, ‘I can’t believe they’re actually paying us to do this.'”
Episode 7 opens with a religious-revival musical sequence in the style of James Brown or Otis Redding. Diggs’ character Oh Father belts out “Raise Him Up” alongside “twerking angels” and a “giant gold Homelander statue” descending from the ceiling. “It doesn’t even make sense that they let us do that, but it’s such a joy,” laughs Lennertz, who won an Emmy last year for “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas.”
Diggs is game to perform “Raise Him Up” at the Emmy ceremony if asked. And he hopes Antony Starr’s Homelander would be right there with him. “It’s his intro song. The whole thing should end with him walking out,” Diggs suggests.
“Maybe if he flies in [from the back of the house] we could do it,” adds Lennertz. “That’d be sweet.” Your move, Television Academy!
So many of The Boys‘ subversive songs are connecting with viewers — and with Emmy voters — with Lennertz praising the show’s writers. “People say we’re like the new Simpsons in terms of being fortune tellers of what’s happening,” he says. “This song and this whole season were all written before the election, before anyone posted a meme about healing a sick person or anyone put giant statues in front of a golf club. That didn’t even happen, and yet it was all in the show a year and a half before. Part of the humor is hitting a little too close to home.”
After getting the part of Oh Father, Diggs received a “pretty substantial reading list” from Kripke about the state of religion and politics, and information on which televangelists were interesting to the writers. “It just got all the synapses firing,” he recalls. He thought his character was “well-conceived” and “really biting,” so he couldn’t say no to The Boys.
It was Lennertz’s idea to bring in Diggs as a co-writer on “Raise Him Up,” especially since he’s known for his hip-hop group Clipping. Diggs is three-quarters of the way to achieving EGOT status, having won an Emmy for The Crossover as well as a Grammy and Tony for Hamilton.
Lennertz remembers telling Kripke, “If possible, I’d love to get him to write the lyrics with me to make sure it’s all in the right voice and something that he feels right about.” He reveals, “We actually struck out the first time with the first version of the song. Eric’s like, ‘It’s not far enough. We’re not pushing it enough.'”
Diggs adds, “When we first started talking about it, it was kind of this rap song and it was a lot more contemporary-feeling. … After that first strikeout, the real collaborative part was getting in the studio and playing with the rhythms and the ad-lib choices and all of that stuff. We got to spend so much time in there, which is great.”
Oh Father is “not only the most popular preacher in the world, but the one who actually has superpowers,” says Lennertz. “He’s going to come out and try to actually convince everyone on the planet that Homelander is God. And so, it has to be that big.” In the end, the character didn’t manage to convert enough people, so “everybody else got slaughtered,” he chuckles.
Daveed’s favorite lyric in the song is “After centuries of religious fraud, say hello to your new God.”
For Lennertz, it’s “The world’s too dark for a Jew in robes and sandals; We need a God who lasers vandals, not a hippie with a beard.”
The duo aren’t worried about offending people online, particularly as “this song was never a referendum on religion or a deity,” notes Lennertz. “This song was a referendum on power corrupting. It’s not making any sort of comment on Jesus or God or whatever. It’s really making a comment on Vought and these heroes who are basically using religion to trick people into making them more powerful. I think that’s pretty universal and it happens way too often.”
“If the thing you identify with most on the show is Vought as a company, if that’s who you are as a human, then you should probably be offended,” Diggs laughs. “Other than that, if you side with anyone else in the show, there’s nothing actually offensive in it.”
Diggs confirms that filming the production number for the seventh episode took multiple days: “We did it enough times that there was enough good stuff from all the different angles that they could use. Those dancers are some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever been around. You see only bits and pieces of the choreography. The thing they did was like a three-minute insane marathon of dance in heels and costumes that don’t breathe and with wings on.”
Lennertz credits the show’s choreographer Amy Wright with putting it all together. “This is the first time I got to be on set when they were shooting something,” he reveals. “All of a sudden, I hear, ‘The angels’ wings keep falling off when they bend over and twerk!’ And I’m like, what other show would ever have a note like that being sent out?”
Something that makes Diggs “really happy” about the nomination for “Raise Him Up” is that his toddler is “obsessed” with it. “He asks that it’s put on all of his playlists and he plays this song all the time, because it hits. It’s a really great song. And then you realize what the lyrics are.”
Lennertz also teases the prequel series Vought Rising, coming to Prime Video in 2027: “It’s fantastic. It takes place in the 1950s, yet is still so appropriate. Jensen Ackles is back as is Aya Cash, who just got a Tony nomination this year. I think it’s going to blow people away.”
