‘The Fascist, the Narcissist, the Villain Has Won’
This interview was conducted prior to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. Spoilers follow for The Boys season-four finale “Assassination Run,” which premiered July 18 on Prime Video.
Antony Starr has a tendency to call Homelander, the murderous superhero he’s brought to unhinged life over four seasons of The Boys, “Homie.” It’s a nickname Starr uses with affection when talking about the character, who ascends to a shadow presidency in the U.S. after a successful coup in the season finale cliffhanger. And it’s somewhat at odds with how The Boys wants us to feel about Homelander, whom showrunner Eric Kripke calls the series’ version of Donald Trump. In previous seasons, we’ve watched Homelander collude with a Nazi and let an airplane full of people crash; this season, he burns off the penis of one of his childhood tormentors and encourages the superheroes in his thrall to beat a man to death like “wrathful gods.”
At one point, Starr catches himself after referring to Homelander as “poor old Homie.” He insists this season’s expanded focus on Homelander’s horrible childhood in Vought’s lab isn’t meant to encourage sympathy for the supe. Starr’s performance is the best of The Boys because it’s as powerful in the character’s most grotesque moments — licking blood off his lips after wrenching a no-longer-useful supe apart vertically — as in his silent moments of despair, like when he broods over the jar of white pubic hairs he’s been plucking all season. The Boys might not want us to feel bad for Homelander, but Starr has made him the series’ most well rounded, and arguably even tragic, character, which can feel like a contradiction when he’s also the show’s avatar for one of the most divisive political figures in this country’s history.
Starr acknowledged the parallels to the 45th president when we spoke last week (before the shooting that occurred during a Trump campaign rally), but doesn’t take credit for them. “I’m just one of the actors. I don’t have a hand in the writing,” says Starr, who appears for our interview wearing a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt and chunky black glasses. “Do I have political opinions? Of course I do. But it’s not my job to voice those as a performer on the show. I’m there to service the character and try to be as honest as I can. With a character like this it’s pretty difficult, because he’s clearly insane.”
Homelander and Sage accomplish their coup in the finale and the episode ends with a speech from Homelander, who moves the new President Calhoun out of his way on the podium so he can speak to Americans about his plans. It’s a big cliffhanger for fans who haven’t read the comics. What did you want to project in that moment?
Originally, I was just standing in the background saying nothing. I’m guessing the camera would have pushed past Calhoun onto me just smiling with satisfaction. But my instinct was Calhoun is a bought-and-paid-for puppet, and Homelander’s ego is gonna demand that he is front and center. I said to Eric, “Mate, it’s so in character for Homie to shuffle that guy out of the way and go, ‘Here’s what’s really going to happen.’” Eric absolutely ran with that. Even if we didn’t hear much of what he said, just the physicality of coming in, interrupting, and moving him out of the way says it all.
It’s almost like the end of the second act in a movie, where the heroes are down and out and it looks like they’ve failed. I needed to project that Homelander the fascist, the narcissist, the villain of the piece, is winning, has won. It’s a setup for the Boys to claw back and fight as we go into season five. The show is ultimately about vigilantes trying to take down the evil — what is it in Star Wars? Who are they?
The evil Empire?
Right. They’re trying to take down the empire.
You’re wearing a Rage Against the Machine shirt. You had to bring up Evil Empire.
The show is a little echo of the likes of Rage Against the Machine. It is standing up to the man. Something that has become a bit of a motif is the one-finger salute, which is the Boys’ attitude toward Vought, the Establishment, the government, all of that.
That scene is a step forward for Homelander. It’s also coming off the back of thinking that he completely failed. If Sage hadn’t walked in when he’s sitting there in the rubble, just despondent, what might his next steps have been? I think quite destructive. But she comes in and says, “Nope, it’s all part of the plan. We won. It’s good.” By the time we get to that speech, Homelander has had nothing to do with it. He’s been a pawn, but he’s twisted it around to make it his own success: No, it wasn’t Sage. I would have got there anyway. This is a character with a colossal ego and a desperate need to be right and keep moving forward. It’s a little bit like a shark: He’s gotta get the water going through the gills, and if he stops moving and catches up with himself, it’s very problematic for him.
Eric said about the fourth season, “We write what we’re either scared of or pissed off about.” Did any scenes this season tap into those feelings for you?
Not so much “pissed off.” But I’m 48. You start taking stock of where you’ve been, where you’re at, where you want to go. All these questions come up about mortality. I wondered if there was a way of getting that in the material. And then I checked myself; it’s not my place to do that. Cut to: I open the first page of the new script, and there’s Homelander scouring his nether regions for silver hairs. That led to themes of legacy, mortality, fatherhood. All of that stuff is coming up for Antony Starr, and then it happened to come up in the material. It was a sign of how in sync Eric and I have been with this character.
Eric has talked about how this show has always been about Trump, but you’ve said you never wanted him to be a “mustache-twirling villain.” This season, we get a lot of Homelander’s abusive backstory. For you as an actor, is there a contradiction between this character being an authoritarian fascist on one hand and, on the other, someone who went through some of the worst things a person can go through?
Ultimately, we’re not trying to garner sympathy or empathy for the character. It’s not an excuse for the behavior. But there’s something of an inevitability if you damage someone that much when they’re young. Take Homelander out of it; the adult that is going to come out of that, unless they have a very fortuitous run with therapy and some serious reconditioning by loving people, is going to end up a certain way.
The thing with Homelander is — and I think everyone does this in real life — we wear masks. Hopefully you learn to be yourself 90 percent of the time, but we all put on different versions of ourselves in different situations. Homelander has been raised to be a Vought-sponsored product. But the man within that is just a coiled mask of insecurity. It’s a real contradiction, the way he behaves in public versus private. That’s one of the things I love about the show: We get to see a lot of that private time.
I think Eric always looked, a little more than me, at the character as something that mimics Trump, and I agree with that. But I wanted to make him as three-dimensional as we can without departing from the obvious fact that he is the villain of the show. The weird thing has been how some people have idolized him and seen him as some kind of leader for their own cause in the real world, which is a little disturbing. But I think they realize this season that he’s not.
So much of the series’ political commentary is housed in Homelander, and this season, some viewers have caught on and not liked that. How much of that do you carry?
I don’t carry any of it, to be honest, because I don’t write the scripts. That’s not my job. I turn up, and I do what I can with the material provided and try to add whatever creative input I can. But I’m a big fan of the Michael Jordan quote, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” I don’t want to alienate anyone. Antony Starr as a brand has room for everyone. And politically in this country, I think there’s a lot of people who are afraid on both sides.
What’s driving a lot of the discourse out there is fear. I am of the belief that it would be really wonderful if everyone could take a beat, stop trying to talk at each other, stop trying to ram their own message down each other’s throat, and actually look at why people are thinking the way they’re thinking. I think there’s a lot of commonality on both sides, and I think people feel left behind. They respond to whoever gives them hope. Even if it’s lies. The truth has become a scarce commodity now that we live in a world with alternative facts. But if you hear someone say, “I’m going to make your life better,” and you feel disillusioned, you’re gonna respond to that.
When it comes to the show, first of all, I do play a character. That’s not me. It’s not representative of what I think. Once I take the Spandex off at the end of the day, I leave it at work. [Laughs.] This country has been very, very good to me. Because I’m not originally from here, I can be a little more objective, maybe. And I see a lot of people hurting and wanting change and reaching for whatever and whoever they think will give them that change. It’s very easy to demonize the other side, and I’m not interested in doing it. I encourage people to get involved in the democratic system that they’re afforded, because not everyone in the world is. It’s like voting with your dollar. Well, you’re voting with your own heart. What country do you want to live in?
Homelander is often paired with female characters: He had Madelyn Stillwell, he had Queen Maeve, in this season he has Firecracker and Sister Sage. I’m curious what you think having a female partner does for Homelander, this character who seems to hate women.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. [Laughs.] Across the board, those actresses that you listed — fantastic. It’s vitally important that you have a good rapport with the people you’re working with, particularly when you’re dealing with this very strange Oedipal complex Homelander has. Homelander wasn’t raised with parents. He was raised in a lab with a lot of psychological manipulation. He’s the strongest man on Earth, but he’s the weakest character in the show. He really craves the nurturing side of women, but his ego demands that he be in control. And he’s been constantly rejected by men. He’s deeply threatened by them, and he has to keep all men very firmly in their place. But with women, there’s a different allowance because of the emotional needs.
A lot of the time with this character, I don’t have clear answers, because I’m trying to ask questions rather than answer them. It’s a little more interesting, I think, to let the audience into the equation, to either form an opinion or to question it.
Homelander’s smile is such a motif. He has a fake smile for selfies and people filming him in public. He has a maniacal laugh when he’s in the Vought lab, torturing the people who ran tests on him as a child. How do you craft the different versions of that smile?
Ninety percent of it is spontaneous. Eric and I go back and forth quite a bit on my scenes. There’s a lot of freedom to play, which means I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. It’s funny you mentioned that scene in episode four. Homelander makes Marty self-pleasure in front of a group of people. I had it in my head that I just wanted to go in and laugh maniacally at him. But those scenes are really hard to do, when you’ve got to really drive into a laugh. It’s almost a physical thing that takes over; you’ve got to try to push past that and somehow make it real laughter. We blocked it, and then we did a rehearsal showing the crew before we set up, and I pushed that out a little bit just to see what would happen. There was just crickets. Pure silence.
I was like, Oh no, is this not gonna work? But I like being in a position where there is that risk of failure. It’s very uncomfortable, but it’s a good place to be when you’re working. So I asked director Phil Sgriccia, “Let me just go for it. We’ll see what happens.” Once we got into it, a lot of emotion, really bitter resentment and teary sadness, came up as well. It’s very confusing for the character, and I think a lot of that ended up in the final cut.
There’s also that scene in episode three where Homelander is beckoned to his reflection in the mirror and speaks with different Homelanders. How did you differentiate them?
That one was really difficult. I did a show in New Zealand where I played twins for six years, and we did a lot of me-on-me scenes. It becomes a very technical exercise in responding to yourself, knowing what mannerisms you’re going to use. Where am I going to dip my head, how do I want to play things, so that it cuts together? This one, with one, two, three, four of me, was more difficult. There was a mirror-on-mirror scene in the season before, and the guy in that mirror is this very abusive parent-type figure that Homelander created as a kid. As he grew up, that character got more and more demented and aggressive. In this scene, that was the one at the top, and we’d already done him shouting last year. You see in military schools when they want the kids’ attention, they don’t shout, they lower their voice. I wanted this one to just be, “Shhh. Everyone shut up.”
The tricky part was every camera setup for each character. I had to jump between the different characters for every setup. So there was the Overlord; and then there was one that was very soft, maternal, caring; and then another one that was reflective of all the insecurities. And then there’s poor old Homie — “poor old Homie.” Homelander standing there, not knowing what to feel and what to do, and the tug-of-war inside his fractured mind ultimately gets silenced by the Overlord version, who gives him a direct course of action. Physically and logistically, we had so little time to shoot that. It was really crammed into the end of a day. We’d go through all four characters in each shot and then move on to the next shot and go one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. It was quite confusing, and I remember by the end of the day feeling completely outside myself, going, I don’t know what we just did, but I’ve got to leave it to the editors. But I think it worked out okay.
In our last minute, tell me: What is your favorite Rage Against the Machine song?
It’s “Bombtrack.” I could sing every word.
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