One of the most difficult things to understand from the outside of a group operating under a personality cult is how intoxicating a personality can be. A charismatic presence, given a regular chunk of your time—say, every Sunday morning, or better yet, every evening after dinner—can be terribly seductive. Television, which focuses on building a relationship with the viewer over time, can use this as a powerful tool to get its point across. Sometimes, when the right actor breathes life into the material, it can be a bit at good at making his point. Consider, for example, Antony Starr’s special performance op The boys as the super-fascist Homelander.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider the difficult task an actor like Homelander would have had. Considering the source material – which I strongly advise against, as it hasn’t aged very well in several ways – Homelander doesn’t really seem like a character that could be be played by a living human being. He’s essentially a caricature, having more in common with political cartoons than the relatively grounded aesthetic of comic book superheroes of his day. There is no humanity in the character as writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson envisioned; he is a means to an (often prurient) end.
However, Antony Starr seemed to innately understand the character from the moment he appeared on screen, and how to add dimension to what was roughly on the comic book page. He managed to project a smile so bright that if you look for it, you only notice Homelander’s dead eyes behind it. He knows how to behave with a tension born of deep insecurity, or how to purse his lips in a way that underlines how unpleasant it is for him to make a threat than to merely repeat himself and repeat the to allow the threat to remain implicit. If he played a wind instrument, he would have an excellent embouchure.
Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime Video
The boys doesn’t work without Antony Starr. The New Zealand actor, who previously starred in the cult hit action series Bansheeplays a character who could fundamentally end the show’s conflict between The Seven’s superhumans and Billy Butcher’s resistance to normal humans whenever he wants, so he regularly has to portray a character who credibly gets in the way of his own way , or exhibits psychological problems that would make an all-powerful man manipulable.
In other words, Starr’s performance does one of the most dangerous things you can do in a story about such an obviously evil man: it makes him empathetic. Understandable. ‘Wisdom of the Ages’, the most recent episode of The boys, picks up a thread in the character’s backstory, about how he was experimented on as a child and mentally broken down so he could be used as a tool by the mega-corporation that created him. It’s heartbreaking stuff that has only backfired, as this broken man has discovered that he now has power over an audience that has been broken in similar ways, that is looking for a charismatic strongman like himself to empower them to take violent action.
Image: Primevideo
The boysHowever, can enjoy moments we don’t often see from real fascist strongmen, when they’re not performing in front of a crowd of adoring fans. Homelander’s story in “Wisdom of the Ages” involves Homelander taking out his increasing feelings of powerlessness as head of Vought on the laboratory personnel who created him, killing them all in a manner reminiscent of the causal cruelty they inflicted upon showed him when he was just a test. topic for them.
In these scenes, Antony Starr threads the needle, conveying the horror of what Homelander suffered when he was a boy named John, as well as how more monstrous he is now. Starr plays these scenes like a horror movie villain, full of cruel lust and mockery. The ease with which Starr slips into this mode—which allows him to continually find shades that are pathetic, funny, frustrating, simmering, and dangerous—is nothing short of dazzling. To the viewer who can see the whole picture, Homelander is a villain through and through. But within the fiction of The boys? That Homelander is only now learning what kind of influence he has. And Antony Starr has made me want to see that through to whatever terrible end The boys has in store.
New episodes of The boys dropped on Thursday.