Patton Oswalt's The Boys Role Could Be "Career-Ending"

Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt was repping nerdom long before it became Hollywood's favorite subculture. Now, with Oswalt's The Boys character, the A.P. Bio star may be taking his nerd cred to dizzying new heights. Though he's had plenty of comic book-related roles over the years, including voicing Uncle Ben and the Chameleon on Disney XD's Spider-Man, voicing The Atom on Teen Titans Go!, and playing agent Eric Koenig (and his brothers) on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Oswalt has never portrayed a proper, costumed superhero in a live-action production. But that may be changing with his role in The Boys.

It was announced that Oswalt had joined the cast of The Boys Season 2 in 2019 via a Twitter post by showrunner Eric Kripke, who stated that the actor was playing a "#secretrole." Despite the Sept. 4 premiere date fast approaching, Oswalt's character has still yet to be officially revealed. The smart money is on the funnyman portraying one of two characters from The Boys comics, but again, everyone is keeping his role close to the vest until he makes his on-screen debut. The first character, and the one that would probably be most exciting to Oswalt, is a superhero called Tek-Knight. The other, which seems a little too on the nose, is a non-superpowered man called The Legend, whose job it is to translate The Seven's real-life exploits into flattering comic book form.

Though some media outlets have reported that Oswalt will be playing Tek-Knight (it's even on his Wikipedia page, though we all know how accurate that is), it's best to keep an open mind until the show confirms one way or the other. In the comics, Tek-Knight is a member of the superhero team Payback, which is the second-most popular super-team after The Seven. It's unclear if Payback will appear in Season 2 of The Boys, but their leader in the comics, Stormfront, is the new chief antagonist of the second season. Tek-Knight wears a robotic suit of armor that enables him to fly (some outlets report that the TV version will only be able to fly in outer space), sort of like Iron Man. Unlike Iron Man, however, he has a strange addiction to sex. He's not just a sex addict, mind you — Tek-Knight will have sex with anything, anywhere, at any time. In his final moments, he is killed after being hit in the head with a wheelbarrow full of bricks while imagining that he saved the world by having sex with an Earth-bound asteroid. While hosting a livestream panel with the cast in June, Oswalt said that his role on The Boys was done in "the most disturbing, career-killing way possible," which definitely tracks with boning an asteroid on-screen.

Another character that Oswalt could play is The Legend. He's an old man who lives beneath a comics shop and who previously worked for Vought as a propagandist, writing comic books that made the supes look like actual heroes instead of megalomaniacs. He eventually retired and became an informant for The Boys, but he still maintained friendly relations with Queen Maeve. His allegiances were never truly clear, and he was eventually murdered by Billy Butcher. Although the role of comic book writer seems to fit Oswalt perfectly, it doesn't really line up with his description of a career-killer.

Whether Patton Oswalt's The Boys character is Tek-Knight, The Legend, or someone else, the actor will definitely be adding an impressive role to his resume when The Boys Season 2 premieres on Sept. 4.