The Boys is “building towards” a complete psychotic break for Homelander

The Boys is currently airing its third season on Amazon Prime Video, and the show feels as vital and alive as ever. Maybe more than any other genre series on the air right now, The Boys feels tapped into our current American moment, and not just because it gleefully skewers all things superhero. With celebrity authoritarians on the rise everywhere, you couldn’t ask for a better villain than Homelander, a dark reflection of Superman who is so powerful he’s become completely detached from the lives of ordinary people, and it’s driving him slowly insane.

Actually, “slowly” might be overstating it. Homelander is not well, and he’s only going to get worse from here. “You could track the meta-mythology of the series essentially as the slow unraveling of Homelander,” showrunner Eric Kripke told the Writers Guild of America West. “So the writers know—and Antony [Starr, who plays Homelander] is a big part of this as well—that, eventually, whenever the series reaches its climax, this guy is going to go full sociopath, and he has to be stopped before some kind of apocalyptic event. That’s what we’re building towards.”

"So then the question, when you back into that as a writer [is] what are the guardrails that are stopping him from doing that? Who is he, as a person, that he doesn’t just go off and destroy the world today? What are the things that he needs? And then how do we slowly peel those away from him one after the other, after the other?So he isn’t so much evolving as he’s devolving, I would say. Right now, he still needs love. He still needs the adoration of fans and the approval and love of his son. There are all of these things that he requires that, if he became a true monster, he wouldn’t have. So we’re spending all the seasons teaching him that he doesn’t need those things one after another, after another. And then once he finally realizes he doesn’t want love or approval from anybody, then obviously, that’s when the big end game starts."

In the first season, Homelander abandoned a group of people to die in a crashing plane once he realized he couldn’t save them all and that saving only a few would be bad for PR. In season 2, he dated a Nazi and got some fun new ideas about his own superiority. In season 3, he basically told Starlight that he would have no problem murdering millions of people if he lost the adoration of the masses. So yeah, he is definitely devolving.

Homelander is “like the walking embodiment of Fox News”

And where did Kripke and his team get their inspiration for a character like Homelander? “[O]ur overall goal was [figuring out] how we make the most realistic superhero show ever made,” he said. “How do we completely live in the thought experiment of what would happen if real people got superpowers in the real world?”

"We actually came at it from a human perspective of, for example, if you had Superman’s power, most likely you would start to disassociate from seeing other people as your equals. If you’re the fastest man alive and you have inevitably, what is a performance-based power, you’re only good as long as you’re the fastest. If you’re second fastest, you’re nobody.So we live in the tension where the gears grind between the complete, total f***ing absurdity of the superhero concept and the reality of our world in human psychology, because those are two very different things. So where those sparks fly is where we find most of our good stuff for the show."

And of course, Kripke gets inspiration from the news. A lot of the time, his process involves him and his writers coming in angry about something, and then channeling it into the show.

Obviously, the Trump presidency provided lots of material, to the point where Kripke would just take snippets from Trump’s speeches and put it in Homelander’s dialogue. “Look, I love this country, but to me [Homelander] represents things like Trump and MAGA and Tucker Carlson, and I wouldn’t define those people as American ethos,” Kripke said. “I would define those people as people who present as American and patriotic, but are ultimately a grab bag of greed, neuroses, and bad faith.”

"So for me, Homelander is more like the walking embodiment of Fox News than what truly represents America, because he presents himself as everybody’s hero and this really strong man, who’s like, “I’m the only one who can save you.” And like many cult personalities, he’s exceedingly good at making really complicated issues feel simple and riling people up. And that’s obviously really dangerous.And if the show has any theme it’s if anyone stands in front of you and says, “I’m the only one that can save you,” do not trust them. They are selling you something, and no one is coming to save you. So we all better figure out how to save each other."

New episodes of The Boys drop Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.

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