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With The Boys having now concluded its fifth and final season, series star Erin Moriarty has opened up about the struggles she faced while filming the final batch of episodes. Moriarty was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder Grave’s disease in May 2025.
In a personal essay published by Time, Erin Moriarty revealed that she spent years secretly battling an undiagnosed case of Graves’ disease — a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes the thyroid gland to become overactive — while filming the final season of The Boys.
In recent years, Moriarty has been subjected to criticism of her apperance on social media, with fans accusing of her receiving bad plastic surgery. Grave’s disease is an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid gland and can cause fatigue, anxiety, and weight loss.
The Boys star Erin Moriarty opened up about her battle with Grave’s disease in heart-wrenching op-ed, says it “nearly destroyed her”
“At the very moment I was losing trust in my own body, I was publicly portraying a character defined by her resilience and endurance. On The Boys, a hit television show that uses the superhero genre to satirize celebrity, politics, and power, I play Annie January, also known as Starlight. She is one of the show’s only earnestly good superheroes. Playing Annie has meant more to me than I can ever articulate. But while filming our precious final season in 2025, I lost her. I lost myself,” Moriarty wrote, via Time.
“These symptoms struck me as I was filming the final season of The Boys and more in the public eye than ever. I was going through the physical hell of chronic illness on a public stage. Doing it in private is emotionally damaging enough, but to have my physical symptoms be speculated about, trivialized, and dismissed was devastating.”
The Boys series finale — the eighth episode of its divisive fifth and final season — hit Prime Video on May 20.