This interview contains spoilers for The Boys Season 4. If you're not caught up yet, check out our full spoiler-free review of the season.
We’ve all heard the phrase “be careful what you wish for,” but for a raging narcissist like Homelander, the proverbial monkey’s paw can be an even tougher pill to swallow. How, as someone who sees themselves as a god, can you reconcile with the fact that all of your dreams of unilateral power are about to come true, but you’re basically a pawn in the process and your final role will be little more than the muscle? I’m not sure of the answer to the question myself, so I sat down with The Boys’ Antony Starr to break down what’s going through his character’s mind as the coup against President Singer and the hostile takeover of America finally kicks into full gear.
A Boy Just Wants To Be Loved
First, it’s important to know where Homelander is sitting emotionally in Season 4. We know from previous episodes that he’s trying to kill the last vestiges of his humanity, but he’ll never really be successful there due to his desperate need to be loved.
“I think he thinks he really shifted the needle in terms of who he is and exercising the demons, so to speak, and really cleansing the palette of his life,” says Starr of Homie’s little trip home in Episode 4 of the season, where he slaughtered the scientists who “raised” him as a child. “Nothing really has been achieved other than vengeance, but in his head, because he's blinded by his needs and wants and his ego, I think he thinks it was pretty successful. Moving ahead, he thinks he's positioned pretty well to get what he wants.”
The “what he wants” portion is, of course, a complicated question for the leader of The Seven. He wants power, but he wants it unilaterally; he wants to be loved, but he doesn’t know how to love in return; he wants trusted advisors, but his narcissism won’t allow him to believe in anyone but himself.
As we know, Homelander started this season sick of being surrounded by yes men. Bringing in Susan Heyward’s Sister Sage was a rare moment of cleverness by The Seven’s brutish leader, but his ability to deal with someone who’s both smarter than him and not afraid of him was limited from the start. Now that he knows that blows to the brain render her powers useless and reduce her to the real-life equivalent of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, his patience with her is at an all-time low.
“When it comes to Sage, he is actually really very reliant on her,” Starr explains. “But he finds himself in a situation where, yeah, she's indisposed and completely unexpectedly he's thrust into a position where he's going to try and take the reins of a six-horse runaway carriage, and he's completely ill-equipped to do it.”
Of course, we all know that Homelander could achieve unilateral power if he really wanted it, but it directly conflicts with his need to be adored. Still, there’s a brief moment in Tek Knight’s study where we almost got that “fuck it” moment where Homelander wipes out every senator and power player in the room.
“There's just a moment where it could go either way,” Starr says of the scene. “He might just [go], ‘You know what? I'll just turn around and laser everyone,’ and who steps into bat? Victoria Neuman comes in as the ultimate pinch hitter, and, we could say, saves the day.”
Starr would later joke that Claudia Doumit’s Neuman ultimately saved the day for Team Evil, which couldn’t be more true. But it’s here where the aforementioned monkey’s paw really starts to curl its fingers against Homelander and his quest for power. Still, there’s a painful realization that the now-Vice President isn’t just a means to an end. He actually needs her for this plan to succeed.
“In the big picture, it's also very difficult for Homelander to accept that he just about failed, well, did fail, and she highlighted that,” says Starr. “It's a double-edged sword for him that she saved his ass and she saved the plan, but she also really did highlight his flaws when it comes to that level of operation and thinking. In that world, he really is a child amongst adults. As much as that is difficult for him to get his head around, there is a definite recognition that he needs her and that she has tremendous value.”
It’s in this moment, after Sage falters and Neuman saves the day, that it becomes aggressively apparent that Homelander isn’t the one in control here at all. “There are little moments when he gets irked because there is that feeling of being a pawn or a chess piece being moved around the board by someone else's hand,” Starr notes.
At the end of the day, he’s just the guy with laser eyes. He’s a little boy trotting alongside the big kids as they lead him toward the coup that he asked Santa bring him for Christmas, but he has no relevant power in his, Sage, and Neuman’s quest for glory. But one should never doubt the ability of the self-absorbed to lie to themselves and twist things in their favor.
“[Neuman taking charge] was a little embarrassing for him, but ultimately, in the big picture, we'll get what we want,” Starr explains. “So, probably Homelander went away from that incident and found a way in his own head to turn it around and make it look like, ’Well, yeah, no, she actually saved them from being slaughtered, so it was actually not me she saved. It was them.’ He's got a great way of twisting things around in his own head to protect his ego.”
Starr notes that, in his perception, Homelander is a “very emotionally fragile and damaged person” who “justifies and twists things to shape his own story and narrative.”
We all know the type. Though I guess the narcissists in our day-to-day lives don’t have laser eyes. So at least there’s that!
Homelander Gets His Milk
Still, if there’s one thing you can trust someone who’s that level of narcissistic to do, it's to end the day with exactly what they want. In this case, it’s Homelander closing things out with a little breast milk as a treat! (Yeah, I gagged a little too, we all knew what we were getting into with this show.)
Obviously I had to ask Starr about having to film curled up against Firecracker’s (Valorie Curry) bosom. Y’know, really round out the interview on a thoughtful note.
“Oh, my God,” Starr starts with a laugh. “When we were teasing the show, I put it out there the strangest scene that I've ever done is in this season, and that was the scene I was talking about. It's just absolutely surreal getting breast milk squirted in the face. It is just hilarious and surreal.
“I just looked at [Curry] and I said, ‘What in God's name are we doing? This is so absurd.’ There's been stranger things. There's been crazier things. We've done all sorts of things on this show, but that, for me, psychologically when we were doing it, I was like, ’Oh, my God, this is just so twisted and strange.’”
Now, everything we know about The Boys tells us that things are only going to get weirder in Season 5, so I had to know how Starr was feeling about Homelander’s breast milk obsession evolving into its final form before the series wrapped.
“I don't know where they go from here. We've done the cow. Now, we've done human breast milk in the face, but that is something that I'm pretty sure [creator/showrunner] Eric Kripke's mind has already laid a few eggs that'll hatch next season, for sure,” Starr laughs again. “I don't know. Not sure how I feel about it. I'll have to get the scripts, digest, and then we'll see where we go, but I'm sure it's going to get weird.”
At this point “I don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to get weird” is The Boys’ unofficial slogan. But at least Homie has Sage and Neuman running the show and Firecracker around for his, uh… needs.
Some quotes have been edited or truncated for clarity.
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
