Do we like them?

Do we like Billy Butcher?

A character from The Boys (2019–2026)

Our score: 4 out of 10. He's right about the supes, and he's a magnetic leader. But he lies to his friends and uses them, and his revenge leaves wreckage everywhere. We'd cheer him on, but we wouldn't trust him with our keys.

Billy Butcher is a British former soldier and black-ops man in a world where superheroes are real, but are marketed by the Vought corporation and often abuse their power. After a personal tragedy tied to the supes, he pulls together a small, scrappy team called The Boys. Their job is to spy on the heroes, dig up their secrets and keep them in check. In the show, Karl Urban plays him.

Butcher is charming, funny and fiercely loyal on the surface, but he is driven by a hatred that consumes him. He is willing to lie to, use and sacrifice the people who follow him, and he treats his team's safety as a cost of doing business. The audience sympathizes with his cause, but he is often the one who makes a bad situation worse.

We score him a 4. His target is truly rotten, and he keeps people fighting when others would quit, but his methods and his obsession with revenge do as much damage to his friends as to his enemies. Critics describe him as the show's most morally gray character, and some argue he is far less noble than he believes.