Valorie Curry has played a lot of characters over the years with whom she had almost nothing in common — a murderous cult member in Fox’s The Following, a paramedic who moonlights for the mob in Amazon’s The Tick, a cryptid researcher in 2016’s Blair Witch sequel — but few have been quite as starkly antithetical to Curry’s personal beliefs as Firecracker.

Firecracker, the latest mutant to join Amazon’s superhero satire The Boys in its new fourth season, is politically divisive, with extremist and often hateful opinions on everything from vaccines and CIA conspiracies to the Lgbtqia community.

Curry, who identifies as a lesbian — she first came out as pansexual on Instagram in 2019, during National Coming Out Day — should have been repelled by Firecracker. But her reaction was just the opposite. “It sounds so gross to say, but I really connected with her right off the bat,” says Curry.