‘The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke has made it clear he sees the show’s villain, Homelander, as a Donald Trump analogue. In our new interview, actor Antony Starr tells us why he doesn’t love that idea, and much, much more https://t.co/bR7aIMYPgM https://t.co/bR7aIMYPgM
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) June 30, 2024
On Homelander being an analogue for Trump, “For me it’s a bit of a red herring because if we strictly stayed in that lane, the character would be one- or two-dimensional, and we wanted to create something a bit more layered than that. We wanted more than a cardboard cutout. It’s the same way that you could look at it like Superman and just go bad. I don’t want to do that. I want to start from the ground up and build a human being that was, OK, how was he raised? He was raised in a lab. What damage did that do? …But let me put it this way. Whatever parallels there are to the real world, it has to be driven by our characters. The narrative has to be driven by the needs of the character, right?”
On Homelander’s milk fetish, “So my memory is it came up in the scripts — full credit to the writing team on this, because it was so weird. It started with X-ray visioning my Oedipal mummy figure while she was breastfeeding, and me pining like that and having a jealous relationship with the baby. And then at the start of Season Two, I found some of her … Homelander found some of her breast milk in a freezer and lasers it, starts drinking it, gets caught. And it was so funny and weird, and I think I sent Eric an email after that scene going, ‘Dude, we gotta get as much milk in this show as possible. This is gonna be like a little motif or a signature thing. Like, we have to do it.’ And he was like, ‘One step ahead of you, brother. I’m putting it in everything.’ And so now every opportunity we get, the milk thing comes out. We don’t have to do anything with it, either. If I just look at someone and sip milk, there’s a twist to it. It’s become a really fun thing. The fans have really glommed on to it. And enjoyed it.”
On Homelander’s emotional state, “When people start getting traumatized or whenever they start using drugs to escape, they emotionally shut off at that age. And so we’re looking at a guy who’s physically the strongest man in the world, who I’ve always looked at as the weakest character in the show because emotionally, psychologically, he’s just completely deficient. He’s like a 12-year-old. And in some ways, less than. And I, that, we do, we look at that with a little more depth in Season Four. And I think that makes the character a little more empathetic, because he’s mentally ill. The guy’s damaged, he’s been through a hell of a lot, and I think the reality of that, trying to honor his way of dealing with it, and how that plays out in him, is very important. We’re in a heightened, very extreme universe, but it all ties back to something that I actually do personally care about and I wanted to try and honor as much as possible. And that is the damage and the mental health issues that come up from the kind of treatment that he’s had. And we all struggle. We all struggle … I’m interested in how we function, what damage does to us. And I think that’s probably why people strangely empathize with the character. Some people got it completely wrong at one point and were championing him like he was the hero and that was a bad thing. That was wrong… He should not be anyone’s real hero, but I do get a lot of people saying that they have very conflicted feelings about him because he does all this horrible stuff, yet he’s desperately trying to be a good father. He genuinely loves the kid. He just doesn’t know how. Because how would he? He’s never been loved.”
