Antony Starr’s Homelander has become one of the most dastardly villains in pop culture, sharing a space with the likes of Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, and Thanos. Season 4 of The Boys managed to give us a peak behind the curtains, fleshing out the sort of environment that Homelander had to grow up in to be as messed up as he is.
While the back story of the character is incredibly tragic, Antony Starr has revealed that the purpose of revealing Homelander’s troubled past is not to garner any sympathy for him, but to depict the circumstances that can yield a monster as bad as him.
Antony Starr’s Homelander has no excuse for his behavior
Speaking with Vulture, Antony Starr talked about what he and Eric Kripke tried to do with the character. While it was always a given that Homelander was a narcissistic megalomaniac, Kripke and Starr were interested in seeing how a character gets to that point, which is something that is explored in Season 4. He said:
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.
Despite audiences witnessing the horrible, horrible things that happened to Homelander in his formative years, the show makes it very clear that the character is not to be sympathized with.
While there have been moments where the character has shown ‘positive’ emotions towards others, it has almost always been when they have successfully furthered his own goals, with or without his instruction.
Homelander behaves in very contradictory ways, says Antony Starr
Antony Starr was clear in stating that Homelander has a huge identity issue. Given that he has always been a product before anything else, the image that he has in public and the one that he reveals in private clash a lot.
The character has no way to process his vulnerabilities in private, and no space in the public eye to do so either. This results in a deeply volatile and flawed human being, who has the added modifier of being the strongest being in the world. Starr said:
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.
Homelander is a character that has taken a lot of abuse, and that has molded the character into being a monstrous and menacing being, one who does not have any sympathy for anyone who is not him.
All episodes of The Boys Season 4 are streaming on Prime Video
