Tilda Swinton — an Academy Award and BAFTA winner, a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson, star of titles like Michael Clayton, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and The Chronicles of Narnia franchise, and an overall ethereal human being. If you were to ask us where we saw Swinton’s career going next, it certainly wouldn’t have been as the voice of an octopus in the latest season of Prime Video’s The Boys. But, here we are, and it’s a reality that we absolutely love. With the first three episodes of the show’s fourth season now streaming, viewers have already met The Deep’s (Chace Crawford) deep dark secret — his octopus lover, Ambrosius. Kept in the confines of The Deep’s closet aquarium, the pair share a twisted and tumultuous love story that’s made all the better by Swinton’s voice crooning from the cephalopod.

If you, like us, were watching your screens thinking, “How the hell did they get Tilda Swinton to do this?” you’ve come to the right place. During an interview with Collider’s Christina Radish, The Boys’ creator, Eric Kripke reveals the – quite frankly – much too easy way that Swinton joined the long list of famous guest stars for the show’s penultimate season. Breaking down the moments leading up to Swinton’s casting as the minxy mollusk, Kripke said,

“We just thought it’d be funny if we had the classiest, biggest Oscar winningest British actress we could possibly find, and that’s a pretty short list. We went out to Tilda, and we didn’t actually know her. A lot of our cameos are friends of friends, or something, and we just cold called her agent. To her everlasting credit, she thought it was hilarious and signed up.”

The Deep and Ambrosius – A Love Story For The Ages

This isn’t the first time audiences have watched The Deep engage in a sexual relationship with a creature from the sea, as we’ll never forget the ill-fated Timothy — may he rest. But with his new lover, things were deeper for Supe as he told his every secret and ambition to Ambrosius. Explaining when the idea for the surf and turf relationship first reached the surface, Kripke said,

“The plan for the season with The Deep was, “Let’s give him a complicated committed relationship and play it absolutely as straight as possible, about infidelity and betrayal and love.” We kept saying, “We wanna do a marriage story, but we wanna do it with The Deep and an octopus. The idea was to play it as dramatic and straight as we possibly could, but obviously, the fact that it’s a mollusk is just so absurd.”

You can stream The Boys on Prime Video.