Antony Starr has played The Boys supervillain Homelander — essentially an 'Evil Superman' — since the beginning, even making an appearance on the spinoff series Gen V. With each passing season, Homelander engages in increasingly vile, pathologically evil acts, cementing him as being among the most evil characters on TV today. However, there are some fans out there who simply, weirdly, can't get enough.
Homelander is a man of complete moral depravity. Over the course of The Boys, he's committed many heinous acts, including rape and mass homicide. In later seasons, his egomania ballooned to the point where he wanted to be in control of the country; as of the end of season 4, he's the de facto leader of the United States. As a result of his autocratic turn, the character has been compared to real-life President Donald Trump.
Despite all of this and much more, there are some fans who are infatuated with Homelander. But don't take it from me. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Antony Starr talked about how thrown he was that some viewers see Homelander in this way. "We had a bunch of guys that we all kind of knocked them down a little but on social media to say, 'This guy is not the hero of any story,'" he explained. "They were really glorifying him, they loved him. Which is surreal."
The Boys has given viewers barely anything sympathetic to latch onto when it comes to Homelander. He's a monster of the highest order. The very fact that there's a divisiveness over him is enough to raise concern. "What I didn't expect was that people would be so conflicted around it and, you know, finding themselves finding empathy for this monster."
Showrunner Erik Kripke disagrees a little bit. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times, he made the case for emphathizes a little bit with Homelander, even if he's not someone to admire. “I don’t think Homelander is sympathetic, but you can empathize with him,” Kripke said. “That’s the magic trick that Antony pulls off. Homelander sees himself as so much better and bigger than human, and yet he’s inescapably human. That conflict, I think, is driving him slowly insane."
Looking ahead to the fifth and final season of the show, Homelander and Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) will no doubt have their final showdown. If we look to the comics, Homelander has plenty more evil deeds haed of him. I won't spoil anything, but... prepare yourselves.
The fifth season of The Boys is set to premiere on Prime Video sometime in 2026. Before that, however, fans will first get season 2 of spinoff Gen V, set to premiere in September.
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