Antony Starr on becoming the worst superhero ever in The Boys (2024)

Antony Starr has all the makings of a leading man: cerulean-blue eyes that convey sensitivity and just a little bit of mischief; the kind of chiselled-marble jawline that could slice a phone book cleanly in half; a name that sounds made up but isn’t. Once you’ve seen him on screen, probably for the first time, in Amazon’s superhero send-up The Boys, you, too, will wonder exactly why it is you haven’t seen him before.

But maybe you have. For the most part, the 44-year-old’s nearly 30-year acting career – forgoing recent exceptions such as cult US drama Banshee – has been focused on his native New Zealand, but his early break was a couple of guest spots as a long-haired, bright-eyed youth on an American production: Xena: Warrior Princess.

“The first time I was a centaur called Mesas with a beard and long, flowing locks,” which meant that they just “put me in tights and made me stand in front of a green screen pretending to be a horse with some weird skippy gallop,” Starr says. Beaming down the camera lens of his iPhone during a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home, he is, to absolutely no one’s surprise, one of the few men who can truly pull off a buzzcut. His decision to shear the blond locks he sports as the evilest superhero of them all, Homelander, has paid off.

“Then, after that, they got me back to do a David and Goliath story. It was a real baptism of fire, because I really didn’t know. I arguably don’t know what I’m doing now, but really at that point I had zero clue.” It was his first time on a real set and his nerves won over. “You could see it in the episode; it was really bad. I saw Lucy Lawless out in Auckland maybe a couple of years afterwards and she very politely said, ‘Oh, that episode was very highly rated, well done.’ But I knew it was shit.”

And yet, even at 21, in an admittedly absurd production, you can see that he’s got something. In The Boys, that something is realised to the fullest extent. As Homelander, the patriarch of a group of costumed heroes who fight crime with the might of an evil corporation behind them, he plays people’s saviour, mummy’s boy and supervillain all rolled into one.

Adapted – with the help of producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the team behind Superbad – from the graphic novel of the same name, it successfully turns the superhero genre on its head, transforming Homelander and his colleagues into corporate pawns with dark secrets. They’re the villains of the piece on the face of it, but the true evil, without getting too Joker about it, is a society that looks quite a lot like our own, in which celebrities are worshipped to the point where they’re given access to the nuclear codes.

Arriving in Summer 2019 a few months after Avengers: Endgame (and just after superhero saturation point for most people), The Boys defied expectations to become a massive hit for Amazon: the platform doesn’t reveal viewing figures, but a rapid-fire two-series renewal speaks volumes. It was an excellently paced and tightly plotted eight-episode first series, which did something new with the genre without reinventing the wheel story-wise. Starr is as thrilled about its success as the show’s fans are. “I’ve been on some shows that were less than popular, and deservingly so, because they were terrible,” he says. “They didn’t deserve to have any support, because they were executed poorly, and I would hate to be on a show that I didn’t think was very good and I’m stuck to it for five years. So this is fantastic.”

Homelander, with a blond quiff, a skintight blue suit and a Star-Spangled Banner cape, is a realist’s vision of Captain America. He is arguably a truer representation of modern America than Chris Evans’ character ever was. What does it take to play such a diabolical, two-faced villain? “Sometimes it’s as simple as, well, what would Superman do? And do the opposite,” Starr says. “I really love being able to turn that on its head and explore the messiness of what is arguably a more realistic take on superheroes.”

As Homelander, he abuses the power he holds over just about everyone, thanks to his unmatched abilities which include Superman-esque laser eyes and flight. He is malevolent, genuinely scary and extremely hateable – and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. And yet, there are moments of vulnerability in which you can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for him – and that is Starr’s power.

Throughout the series, there are moments so shocking that it feels like the writers are in a constant battle to one-up themselves, from Hughie being left with his recently exploded girlfriend’s severed hands, to super-speedy A-Train gruesomely obliterating a civilian while sprinting at full pelt, to Hughie later blowing up a see-through hero via a bomb lodged in his rectum – and that’s just the first two episodes. But there is really no topping the now-notorious plane scene, in which Homelander condemns hundreds of passengers to death after he botched a rescue attempt during a terrorist attack. It can’t have been easy to perform...

“I’ve got to be honest, I found it hysterically funny,” he says. “I really did. 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.”

It was not quite as straightforward for his costar Dominique McElligott, whose super-strong Queen Maeve tries in vain to get him to change his mind. “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 ass off, clowning around.”

Kiwi comedy crime series Outrageous Fortune was Starr’s real breakthrough, arriving ten years after his Xena debut. He played twins with opposing personalities, a stoner and a Patrick Bateman-type, and it made him a household name in New Zealand.

“The beauty of that was having to look at a scene from a much more objective perspective, whereas I think a lot of actors come in and they know what is needed from their character’s perspective but they don’t really think about the other person and how it fits in the story. So, having to do scenes with myself, in which I had to work out both sides with the story elements and how it fits, really gave me a different insight into how shows are put together.”

By the time he had landed the lead role on Banshee – a crime drama from US network Cinemax in which he played an ex-con who conned his way into becoming sheriff of a small Amish town – in 2013, he truly realised the gulf between his homeland and Hollywood.

“The work aspect is literally why I’ve left. You hit the ceiling down there very quickly and there’s not much to do other than go sideways to Australia or here. The average New Zealand TV show [costs] 400,000 NZ dollars per episode; on Banshee it was, like, $4 million an episode. The scale is just infinitely bigger and it’s very easy to get sidetracked by that.” And it’s Banshee, not The Boys, which has fans stopping him on the streets, even today. “I don’t get much [recognition for The Boys] at all because the blond hair [is gone],” he says.

Series two of The Boys, which launches on Friday on Amazon Prime Video, has a lot of work to do in order to live up to its predecessor, not least because expectations are now much higher than they were at the outset.

“I think series one was a feet-finding process,” Starr says, “and I think series two is a more self-assured take on what the show can be. I think it’s found its footing very solidly and I hope people respond to that and we continue to grow an audience. We’ve got some pretty rabid fans, so hopefully we can keep them happy.” (They’re particularly rabid around costar Chase Crawford, but that might be the Gossip Girl connection.)

Having done away with the woman standing in the way of him and the top of the company in last year’s series finale, Homelander seems to be almost unstoppable. But that won’t last. “In series two he’s really dealing with the consequences of having taken such bold actions in series one. And that very quickly puts him in a position of pure uncertainty.” Whatever terra firma he could rely on is snatched away from him, explains Starr, “and then it’s about him trying to regain control”.

There’s also the small matter of newfound fatherhood, having discovered that Becca Butcher gave birth to his son and has been raising him in secret. “He flies off and tries to become a daddy, and kids don’t ever seem to do what they’re told. He can’t laser him, so the old dog has to learn a lot of new tricks in order to catch up with what’s going on around him.”

For fans, seeing where Starr takes this villain will form a large part of what has them tuning back in. As for the third outing of the show, there is still no return date set, with a prolonged gap between series likely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is still wreaking havoc upon his adopted homeland.

“We don’t have a date. Once things become a bit clearer around the Covid situation we’ll get a better sense of how and where and when we can put series three together. But I would say sometime early next year, realistically. America has done such a catastrophic job of dealing with this virus. I think they’ve given up on really trying to do anything but manage what’s going on and pray for a vaccine.”

But he does have one teaser to whet the audience’s appetite for what might be coming down the pipeline. “At the end of series two, I sort of floated the idea of ‘What can we expect?’, given it’s a pretty intense ending for Homelander at the end of series two. And Eric said, ‘I’m just going to tell you two words: homicidal maniac.’”

Episodes one to three of The Boys series two are streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

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