Did you know Gen V built (another) giant dick, just like The Boys?

A tiny character can make for a huge amount of fun for a TV show’s practical effects team. Gen V, Prime Video’s excellent college-set spinoff of The BoysEmma Meyer (Lizze BROADWAY) is a young student who can shrink or grow depending on the amount of food that she consumes.

The show is set in the fictional world of The Boys, Gen V has certain standards to uphold — namely, it has to live up to one of the most arrestingly lewd black comedies on TV, where an Aquaman-esque hero fornicates with an octopus and a shrinking man walks into a sexual partner’s urethra (built to scale).

Gen V In an early scene, Emma gets into bed with a man after he shrinks. It’s an extremely funny and explicit sex sequence where Emma is scaling a giant male penis. Gen VColin Penman and his team of prosthetics and props bring the story to life.

Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

Penman, however, would be starting from scratch — his team did not work on the penis tunnel built for The Boys.

“This was our first experience with a giant dick situation,” Penman told Polygon via Zoom. As with all projects of this magnitude, the first step is to be small.

“Our prop master went and bought this big dildo and we had a little doll, and we were sort of working out the logistics.” Penman says. “Then we figured out the size [for the final model], which was I think it was about 6 feet, in the end.”

Penman’s team and Penman worked on the plan in miniature before moving to a larger prop made of foam, silicone, wire and clay. Broadway dropped by to test the final product, but it was still unpainted. They jumped onto the prop and terrified the props team.

“We all kind of made a huge gasp and we thought, Oh my godIt wobbled, she held on, and it didn’t break or tear. It was awesome.” Penman says. “That kind of dictated what she was going to be able to do on the [shoot] day, because I think originally she was going to be dancing beside it.”

It was less risky on Broadway, but much more challenging for props to create a giant ear that she could swim from after a scene when Emma killed a guard and jumped into his ears. A massive production, the 15-foot ear was built by making a cast of the actor’s ear, which was then scanned and made into a giant multi-part mold by another company in Alberta, Canada.

Penman, his team, and I then assembled and painted the prosthetic ear and filled it with faux blood.

Photo: Colin Penman/Prime Video

“They built this giant rig that pumped about 1,000 gallons of blood into the ear; it would fill up from underneath and then pour out and then it would get pumped back up and recycled,” Penman says. “So you just keep it going all day long, and Lizze would get in and dunk herself under and pop out.”

In other words, it’s not easy to be an actor playing a small person. But it’s just as challenging to erect (not sorry) a world capable of convincing an audience that their shrinking hero is capable of doing shocking and hilarious things they could never do when full-size.