Antony Starr sees Homelander as much more than a Donald Trump parallel

Recently, a certain sect of The Boys’ fans got a rude awakening. Shockingly, the show that depicts a deeply patriotic superhero as a psychopathic, milk-guzzling maniac with an equally boorish band of followers isn’t exactly trying to make America great again. While anyone with a working frontal lobe knew that from the minute Homelander lasered his first victim, we can’t expect too much from a group who didn’t realize that the obvious Trump-insert was, indeed, a Trump-insert until the show’s creators put a literal presidential election on the screen to hammer the point home.

Besides, according to Homelander actor Antony Starr, the caped cruel-sader isn’t meant to exactly parallel the former president. He’s his own power-hungry “psychopathic narcissist” with mommy issues, thank you very very much! In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Starr called the allusions “a bit of a red herring because if we strictly stayed in that lane, the character would be one- or two-dimensional and we wanted to create something a bit more layered than that.”

“It’s the same way that you could look at it like Superman and just go bad,” he explained. “I don’t want to do that. I want to start from the ground up and build a human being that was, okay, how was he raised? He was raised in a lab. What damage did that do?” The team clearly had fun digging into Homelander’s psyche a bit more this season, which Starr says is the real foundation on which the character is based—not on any one real-world reference.

“Whatever parallels there are to the real world, it has to be driven by our characters. The narrative has to be driven by the needs of the character, right?” he said. “[O]bviously, there’s an election in the show, and there’s a real election this year. But that’s actually a really natural progression from Homelander’s perspective, because we’ve been dabbling in politics and trying to get in the military from season one. So there’s always been those elements that parallel the real world. But I feel like they always relate well to the show. It’s not like just, oh yeah, we want to stick that in for no other reason than just to poke fun at something in the real world.”

In a June interview with Variety, series creator Eric Kripke also said that Homelander’s mania predated Trump’s, although at this point the two are inextricably linked. “When we first pitched the show, it was before Trump was elected. And the idea that a celebrity would actively want to turn themselves into a fascist autocrat was kind of a crazy idea. I mean, it still is. But it turned out to have happened?” he said. “We sort of lucked into a show whose metaphor is really about the moment we’re living in, which is the cross-section of celebrity and authoritarianism. And so once we realize that, we’re like, “Well, we have to go all the way.”

This season of The Boys premieres new episodes every Thursday on Prime Video. The finale will drop on July 18.