Karen Fukuhara On Kimiko’s Dancing, Singing, Violence Bringing Journey in the Boys’ Season Three

The Boys finally premiered its Season Three finale, a complex affair that saw a major change amongst the series’ Supes hierarchy. While Homelander, Starlight, Soldier Boy, and more throw the existing power rankings into disarray, perhaps no character had as dramatic a Season 3 journey as The Boys’ resident badass Kimiko. I spoke with The Boys star Karen Fukuhara about nearly every aspect of Kimiko’s wild Season 3 journey, from singing and dancing with Frenchie to her moral reckoning to her combat proficiency (and even about dance practice at cast member birthday parties).

I love Kimiko, she’s one of my favorite characters in the series. She has such an interesting arc this season!

Karen Fukuhara: Thank you so much. How did you like it? Did you watch all of it?

I did! It was intense, but I thought it was a great season. Some of the best writing so far, actually.

KF: Wow! Such high praise, thanks! … I mean, I didn’t write it…

I’ll just say you get a story credit, why not. But Kimiko has such an interesting journey this season, from being considered a weapon to losing her powers, then choosing to restore powers. Tell me about her arc this season.

KF: I can do full spoilers on this one?

Oh, absolutely

KF: Amazing, okay. That’s my favorite. Yeah, I think at the beginning of Season Three, you find Kimiko and Frenchie really enjoying life for the first time ever. And that’s something that Kimiko has never had the opportunity to do amongst this… she was in some of the most dire circumstances, put in terrible situations. And I’m surprised as an outsider, looking at her and how she hasn’t turned into a completely bad person yet, because of all the drama that she’s gone through.

The beginning of the season, she’s enjoying life, she’s going to restaurants, going dancing with Frenchie, discovering musicals, and she’s loving life. She’s on the highlights, is on the high road, and then quickly things turn. This season is about her trying to figure out whether this life is for her, with The Boys, this life of violence and blurred lines. Is it something that she wants to do for the rest of her life, or what is her true desire here? What kind of story does she want to tell?

And she loses her powers halfway through the show. I think that process helps her realize that the monster that she had become is not 100% all her superpower’s fault or her circumstance’s fault. She has to learn to own up to it, and to sort of step into her own so that she can regain her powers and live her life in the way that she wants to do it.

That really comes through this season. Even when she’s depowered, she… shall we say, regulates a couple gentlemen. What was it like to film those scenes?

KF: The Little Nina fight was one of the hardest, most difficult fight sequences that I’ve ever had to do. Not only was it really emotional and vulnerable, but it was a long day of filming in this cold warehouse, drenched in a puddle of water and blood. I didn’t have my powers, so it wasn’t like ‘one strike and they’re dead,’ it was many moments where I’m the one getting beaten up. I’m not used to that! It was one of the hardest days on set.

That whole sequence was cool because as a viewer you get to see her strength and her skills as someone that’s trained in combat. In Shining Light she had this training, and she knows how to use a gun, and for the first time, I think, you get to see her really utilizing all of those skills, the practical human skills… and then, at the same time, it was a rough one. Kimiko in that moment, realizes the monster she has become. Up till then she had been blaming other people for her unfortunate circumstances, for her being violent, but in that moment she realizes that it’s really her. It’s like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you just have that realization.

I thought it was pulled off meticulously. I also love Kimiko’s daydreaming this season about singing and dancing. Why is that where her mind goes so often this season?

KF: In Season One, we see her loving this boy band, you know, she’s kind of fangirling over this boy band that’s on the television when she’s captured. I’d like to think that that was sort of an escape for her, the only way to really hold on to anything to keep her life going. She was in such a dire situation. But aside from that, I think we forget that even though we see cute Kimiko ripping heads off, and have these crazy action scenes, we forget that if it weren’t up to other people her life would be somewhat normal, and be able to live the childhood that she’s always wanted to have.

She had [this] childhood that she’s always dreamt of having with Kenji, her brother, and at this age it’s finally coming true. You see it in the musical sequences. You see it in her singing, and she’s inspired by Voughtland, so I think it just comes from a very innocent, natural place for her. What would your inner child like to see if you were given the choice to do so?

Absolutely. A related question: was that your natural singing voice? And what it was like to film that hospital dance sequence?

KF: Of course! Yeah… it was me singing. *laughs* I hope it was okay… I had a ton of fun training for the dance sequence, and also going through vocal training to get myself to that point. Obviously, it’s not something that I do every day, and the last time I sang was a pretty long time ago so I had to get back into, you know, doing the scales with the piano, and having my vocal coach send me recordings and all that. But that’s the best part of being an actor, you get to tap into skills that you may have never thought you’d acquire. Or you get to revive the ones that you already had. So yeah, that was a challenge but it was so much fun.

And Tomer is such a great scene partner and dance partner to have because we shoot the shit all the time. It’s fun, but we also are pretty serious people when it comes to working so we practice a lot. I think one time we were at Erin Moriarty’s birthday party, it was a dinner, and we went up to Erin and some other cast members, we were like ‘do you want to see the dance that we’re working on?’ Everyone’s having their cocktail and then we’re like ‘5-6-7-8,’ and we just broke out into it. We were just trying to practice everywhere we went.

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You can catch The Boys Season 3 in its entirety on Prime Video.