The Boys stars on filming long-awaited 'Kimchie' moment: 'I didn't realize how beautiful it would be'

Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Boys season 4 finale, "Assassination Run."

Shippers, rejoice! After a long will-they-won't-they courtship that lasted seasons, Karen Fukuhara's Kimiko and Tomer Capone's Frenchie — whom the actors both heartedly endorse as "Kimchie" — finally solidified their romantic attraction for each other with a Hollywood-style kiss in The Boys season 4 finale.

"I did a cute little gasp when I read it [in the script]," Fukuhara tells Entertainment Weekly. "It took the entire season to get to that point."

"This relationship, it's crazy because it got more complex and more interesting along the way," Capone says in a separate interview. "I don't know every beautiful friendship/romantic soulmate/twin flame story needs to evolve to kissing. It was weird, but also felt very right. It is that bridge you cross in a relationship where nothing's going to go back to being the way it was for these two."

Four seasons in, Fukuhara was convinced this moment for their characters wouldn’t happen. Frenchie was the first to really bond with Kimiko back in season 1, learning her unique form of sign language, and the two have only gotten closer. They traversed parallel emotional paths as each confronted the traumas of their pasts: Kimiko being a child soldier for the Shining Light Liberation Army and Frenchie committing horrific acts under the employ of Russian mobster Little Nina (Katia Winter).

The season 2 finale seemed to suggest they might get together when Frenchie decided to introduce Kimiko to “dancing” for the first time, but it turned out to be platonic by the time season 3 rolled around. Then in season 4, showrunner Eric Kripke and the writers confirmed Frenchie's bisexuality by giving him a romantic relationship with Colin (Elliot Knight), a man who works for Starlight’s charity organization.

“I thought, ‘Oh okay, it’s actually not going to happen,’” Fukuhara says of her reaction to that particular storyline. “I was quite disappointed because I do ship Kimchie. I've always wanted them to get together, but was okay if they weren't going to be."

"Frenchie's not the kind of dude who would like anyone. He will pull a gun if someone will try to define him or give him any specific gender or something like that," Capone says. "He's just live and let live."

Capone isn't heavily active on social media, but he heard through the grapevine about homophobic commenters expressing their dismay over Frenchie's relationship with Colin. "I was very sad about it," he says. "I try not to give it too much focus because I know it comes from insecurity that people feel about themselves, about their ego, about their machoism, about whatever it is. On the other side, I got so many beautiful people writing me about a strong character like Frenchie being bisexual. I get a lot of people telling me that it really helped them with feeling good about themselves. Haters are going to hate. I want to see them get out from the keyboard and come mess with Frenchie."

The Frenchie-Colin relationship ultimately fizzled out in tragic fashion when Frenchie confessed to Colin that Little Nina tasked him with assassinating Colin's family years before they met. Colin took out his rage in a very physical way, leaving a guilt-plagued Frenchie to turn himself into prison and Kimiko to help coax him back to life.

Fukuhara isn't quite sure if the Kimchie shippers had anything to do with this character development in the finale episode, but she says Kripke was definitely aware of fans wanting Kimiko and Frenchie to get together. She also feels he took notice of her onscreen chemistry with Capone and factored that into the storyline for season 4. 

"On the day when we were filming that kiss, I didn't realize how beautiful it would be. I was blown away," she says. "I didn't know how they were going to shoot it in the script. It just said they lean in for a kiss. I knew it would be special, but I didn't know it was going to be this backlit beautiful thing. I was so happy that they got their moment in that way. It was beautifully shot."

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But this is The Boys, after all. And we're heading into the final season. Nobody is getting their happy ending. Well, except for Antony Starr's Homelander. With the diabolical supe now fully in control of the U.S. government, the members of the Boys split off to go into hiding, but they're too late. Homelander already mobilized his supe soldiers to track them down, likely to be shipped off to those concentration camps for dissenters he was planning with Tek Knight (Derek Wilson).

The Guardians of Godolkin, the incredibly strong Sam Riordan (Asa Germann) and mental-manipulating Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips), two supes from spinoff series Gen V, get the jump on Kimiko and Frenchie. Sam restrains Kimiko, allowing Cate to mind control Frenchie into a containment van.

As Kimiko watches helplessly as they cart her love away, she cries out, uttering her very first words since going mute: "No!"

"I think it was written perfectly," Fukuhara says of that moment. "I always thought that if Kimiko were to speak, it would be this guttural response to something in the original comics." She points to a moment in the source material, created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Roberston, where the typically silent "the Female" speaks when the Boys try to prevent Butcher from doing something horrible. "I thought that was a revolutionary moment in the comic books, and I was so proud of her reading it," Fukuhara continues. "I thought, 'If our show is going to do this, that's also going to be a really, really crucial moment for the series.'"

She appreciates how the show made this moment fit into the context of who her Kimiko is now. "Her not being able to speak is coming from childhood trauma. It's not a physical attribute," she explains. "So it would make sense that, in this time of dire need, the only thing that could possibly save Frenchie in that moment is her voice — and that's the one thing that she doesn't have."

Fukuhara has a long list of voiceover credits to her name, including Netflix's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, FX's Archer, Disney+'s Star Wars Visions, and the Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron. So she's intensely thinking about how she wants Kimiko's voice to sound in the upcoming season 5.

"That's actually something that I think about on a daily basis," the actress says. "I am excited and also a bit nervous because I feel like all four seasons are leading to that moment. There's a lot of anticipation and excitement towards it, especially from the fans. So I want to do it justice. We'll see when that moment is."