'The Boys': Erin Moriarty on Graves' Challenges and Heartbreaking Finale
Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), Starlight (Erin Moriarty) in 'The Boys' season five.
Jasper Savage/Amazon Prime Video
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[This story contains spoilers from The Boys season five, episode four, “King of Hell.”]
Erin Moriarty can’t bring herself to watch The Boys’ final season. Of course, she loves the show and her signature role of Annie “Starlight” January, but she isn’t ready to revisit such a debilitating time in her life.
In June of 2025, Moriarty went public with her then-recent Graves’ disease diagnosis. At that point, she was six months into filming The Boys season five, and her doctor’s conclusion immediately explained why she hadn’t been feeling like herself throughout production. Her various symptoms, including chronic fatigue and nausea, soon fell by the wayside thanks to immediate treatment, and she finally felt human again in time for the series finale.
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“It did lead to me not being as present for Annie during this final season as I would’ve hoped, and that was super painful for me. I thought, Oh my God, I’m failing Annie and I’m failing our audience,” Moriarty tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It was like I was offline for the first six to seven episodes, and then I came back online. I finally felt present at the very end of season five.”
Moriarty is also offering her thoughts on season five’s fourth episode, “King of Hell.”
Rattled by Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) latest brush with death, Annie decides to leave her boyfriend and allies behind to track down her estranged father, Rick (Tim Daly). Annie’s mother, Donna (Ann Cusack), originally claimed that Rick walked out on them due to shoddy investments. But in the season one finale, Annie exposed that lie after confronting her mother about her superpowers being created in a lab, not by God, as she had led her to believe. Donna still didn’t come completely clean, insisting that Rick left after regretting their decision to inject Annie with the superhero serum known as Compound V. Annie then speculated at the time that her father probably didn’t want to lie about the nature of her powers.
Annie’s theory proved to be correct when Rick confirms that Donna’s pious fraud caused him to leave. He also reveals that he proudly tracked Annie/Starlight’s accomplishments from afar and urged her not to turn her back on the people she loves like he did.
“He really galvanizes her and catalyzes her to find herself and her heroism for the remainder of the season. If she had previously gone to her father for this information, it would’ve fueled further resentment toward her mother,” Moriarty tells The Hollywood Reporter. “That would’ve negated her ability to move forward in her story. But right now, she’s like, ‘You know what? Mom did the best she could.’ It’s a testament to Annie’s emotional maturation at this point.”
As for the upcoming May 20 series finale of showrunner Eric Kripke’s superhero satire, Moriarty believes it will leave the audience both satisfied and heartbroken.
“It’s a heartbreaking episode. It’s not overtly cynical. When I read the finale as a script, it was my favorite episode this season, as it should be,” Moriarty shares. “I think the audience is going to be so immensely satisfied by the finale. I never like to give a resolute prediction like that, and I never have, but I’m saying it now because I have so much excitement and confidence in it.”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Moriarty also discusses Annie’s new bad habit she recommended in between seasons, before revisiting the show’s collective anxiety surrounding season four’s finale.
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You probably shed most of your tears during production, but now that we’re halfway through The Boys’ final season, what are your emotions at the moment?
It’s very bittersweet. I sound like a broken record, because that’s the term we all keep coming back to, but there aren’t words to suffice this moment in time. The mourning and goodbye to my character happened when season five wrapped. But now that the world is watching our final season, I’m experiencing a very, very sharp sense of extreme gratitude. Sincere gratitude gets me emotional, it all still feels so surreal to me. I still feel like it