Ethan Slater talks "Gen V" season 2's surprise reveal and playing Thomas Godolkin: He's 'dark and twisted and weird' Nick RomanoOctober 15, 2025 at 11:53 PM 0 Neilson Barnard/Getty; Jasper Savage/Prime Ethan Slater at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards; Slater's Thomas Godolkin on 'Gen V' season 2 ...
- - Ethan Slater talks "Gen V" season 2's surprise reveal and playing Thomas Godolkin: He's 'dark and twisted and weird'
Nick RomanoOctober 15, 2025 at 11:53 PM
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Neilson Barnard/Getty; Jasper Savage/Prime
Ethan Slater at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards; Slater's Thomas Godolkin on 'Gen V' season 2
This article contains spoilers from Gen V season 2, episode 7, "Hell Week."
Thomas Godolkin is ready to tell his side of the story.
Ethan Slater is opening up for the first time about his Gen V role, which only became more interesting as season 2 progressed. The penultimate hour of The Boys' college-set spinoff revealed Hamish Linklater's Dean Cipher isn't really Cipher at all, but a human vessel named Doug that Godolkin psychically commandeers to move about the world while his actual body remains burned beyond recognition.
Slater only now more firmly steps into the role because Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) used her blood-bending powers to restore Godolkin's body, unaware that he's secretly been perpetrating all of the season's horrors behind the mask of Cipher.
Prime
Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater) awakens on 'Gen V' season 2
"I had been given vague clues. It was like, 'You're really prominent towards the last two episodes,' 'You have these little moments beforehand,' and 'You're kind of the big bad.' But they didn't quite tell me about the twist with Hamish," Slater tells Entertainment Weekly. "So the first few episodes that I read, I didn't know. Then I got on a phone call and [showrunner] Michelle [Fazekas] laid it all out for me. After that phone call, they sent me [episodes] 7 and 8, and I got to read it."
Slater first appeared as the founder of Godolkin University in the Gen V season 2 premiere. A brief flashback revealed his involvement in the creation of the superpower-granting drug Compound V before he was burned to bits in a laboratory experiment gone awry. To prepare for his later episodes, the Wicked and SpongeBob Musical star was given footage from the premiere so he could align with Linklater's performance as Godolkin vis-à-vis Doug.
"I had to then incorporate some of his speaking patterns and his language into my Thomas Godolkin to make sure that it felt like one and the same," Slater says. "He's an elevated villain who is smarter than anyone else in the room. I was trying to do a little bit of [Linklater's] voice and get some of the rhythms of things."
Slater was particularly drawn to the way Godolkin thinks. "You can see his thought process, but only the second after he says the line," Slater explains. "Some people you understand as they're saying the line. For him, I think he's just a step ahead of you no matter what's happening. That's what I was intrigued by and wanted to get a flavor of."
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Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater) attacks a student with mind control on 'Gen V' season 2
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The actor admittedly never met Linklater while shooting the series. He's not even fully certain they were both in Toronto, the Gen V production's primary shooting location, at the same time. Though, he notes, "We got to talk afterwards and that was pretty fun."
Godolkin is quite a departure for Slater in terms of what audiences primarily know him for. He says there was "the tiniest bit" of overlap between his schedules for the two Wicked movie musicals and Gen V. He relays how he wrapped filming the season 2 finale at 3 a.m. in the morning on Oct. 31, 2024, then went to the Toronto airport so he could start the Wicked press tour later that same day in Seattle. Slater calls it "one of the craziest transitions of my life."
Heading into the Gen V season 2 finale, which drops on Prime Video Wednesday, Oct. 22, Slater describes Godolkin as "so incredible and dark and twisted and weird. It was an added layer of awesome to work on the twist."
on Entertainment Weekly
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October 16, 2025 at 02:00AM