Antony Starr‘s thirst is real when it comes to a good running joke.
The star of The Boys looked back on his pseudo-superhero character Homelander’s unexpected milk fetish that emerged in the first season and has since become his and showrunner Eric Kripke‘s humorous wink to die-hard fans.
“So my memory is it came up in the scripts — full credit to the writing team on this, because it was so weird,” he recalled to Rolling Stone. “It started with X-ray visioning my Oedipal mummy figure [Madelyn Stillwell as played by Elisabeth Shue] while she was breastfeeding, and me pining like that and having a jealous relationship with the baby. And then at the start of Season Two, I found some of her … Homelander found some of her breast milk in a freezer and lasers it, starts drinking it, gets caught.”
Starr continued, “And it was so funny and weird, and I think I sent Eric an email after that scene going, ‘Dude, we gotta get as much milk in this show as possible. This is gonna be like a little motif or a signature thing. Like, we have to do it.’ And he was like, ‘One step ahead of you, brother. I’m putting it in everything.’ And so now every opportunity we get, the milk thing comes out. We don’t have to do anything with it, either. If I just look at someone and sip milk, there’s a twist to it. It’s become a really fun thing. The fans have really glommed on to it. And enjoyed it.”
In the Season 3 episode ‘Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed’, Homelander finds a cow in a farmhouse, milks it and drinks the milk from a bucket.
Based on the comic book of the same name, the Amazon series features Starr as Homelander, the sinister leader of a group of world-famous superheroes backed by a corrupt corporation. The New Zealand actor also touched on comparisons of the “psychopathic narcissist” character to Donald Trump.
“It’s interesting because that was something that came up a lot. For me it’s 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,” he explained. “We wanted more than a cardboard cutout. It’s the same way that you could look at it like Superman and just go bad. I don’t want to do that. I want to start from the ground up and build a human being that was, OK, how was he raised? He was raised in a lab. What damage did that do? In Season Four, we really get into it. ‘Homecoming’ is a fun episode.
“But let me put it this way. 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? So yeah, obviously, 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,” added Starr.
New episodes of The Boys Season 4 are available to stream Thursdays on Prime Video.