New Zealand actor Antony Starr became a household name after starring as the deranged and overpowered Homelander in Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys. Starr’s character is the antagonist of the show in which most characters are anti-heroes. Based on a comic book of the same name, Starr’s performance in The Boys gained particular praise.
Antony Starr’s deranged Superman character has been the subject of many memes and think pieces, especially due to some purely evil sequences. The actor mentioned how he enjoyed filming one such scene in season one of the show. Spoilers ahead.
Antony Starr Loved Filming The ‘Plane Massacre’ Scene From Season 1
While Antony Starr began his career in the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess, he had his breakthrough with the New Zealand crime series Outrageous Fortune. Starr then played the role of Lucas Hood in the crime thriller Banshee, in which he played a conman who pretends to be the Sheriff of a town. However, his role as Homelander in the Amazon Prime Video series The Boys has made him a worldwide star.
Antony Starr plays Homelander just like an antithesis to Superman, with only the image of a rightful American hero to the masses but actually being manipulative and dictatorial. This was established in the opening episode of the series where he was seen causing the death of a Senator and his son as the politician was blackmailing his love, Madelyn Stillwell.
The character is also extremely unpredictable in his choices and every time a viewer thinks he can not go this far, he does. In a pivotal sequence in season one, Homelander and his partner Queen Meave are tasked with saving the passengers of a hijacked plane. However, Homelander accidentally breaks all the controls from his laser eyes as he subdues a hijacker.
Knowing that the plane would be crashing and it would be impossible to save the passengers, Homelander decides to take off and tells Maeve to do the same. Starr mentioned in an interview with GQ that he had a lot of fun playing that scene,
“I’ve got to be honest, I found it hysterically funny…It was an accident, let’s be honest. Homelander didn’t mean to laser the plane controls, but once that was done, he’s just like, ‘Ah, we’re screwed. We can’t do anything here and we can’t have any survivors because they’re gonna know what happened and they’re gonna reveal it’, so there’s a dispassionate pragmatism that kicks in and logic that we have to go.”
The scene occurs in the fourth episode of the series titled ‘The Female of the Species’, which explores the protagonists as they try to find out about Compound V.
Antony Starr’s Co-Star Did Not Have Fun While Filming The ‘Plane Massacre’
The Amazon Prime Series The Boys has many sequences in its three seasons that push the limits to the darkness in the characters. From the first episode’s opening scene where Jack Quaid’s Hughie Campbell holds his girlfriend’s detached hands as the superhero A-train runs into her, to other sequences such as the ending of season two, the show subverts expectations on how far it will go.
One of the truly horrific parts of the plane massacre is the hope and facade that Homelander tries to give the passengers as he goes to the back of the plane to escape. The priorities shift within a minute of the controls being lasered and Antony Starr’s Homelander makes a quick decision to abandon ship.
However, his co-star Dominique McElligot, who plays Queen Maeve reportedly did not have as much fun during the sequence, just like her character. Starr told GQ,
“She had a terrible day because she’s the audience’s vehicle into the emotion of the scene, and throughout that she’s in tears and pleading with people. She was distraught for two days on the plane set. I, on the other hand, was laughing my a*s off, clowning around.”
Queen Maeve tries to change Homelander’s mind, even asking him to save a mother and daughter, but he reasons that if they were left alive, they would reveal that the superheroes escaped. He even threatens the passengers as they approach him to be saved. The icing on the cake for this dark sequence is when Vaught decides to spin the plane crash to allow superheroes into the military.
