Sitting down with Antony Starr, who plays perhaps the most intriguing villain on current television as Homelander on Prime Video's "The Boys," is disconcerting. Homelander is an Aryan super-sociopath, a gleaming Mr. America with a license to kill. Starr, human-sized and chummy, sports fashionable chin scruff, one pair of glasses on his face and one hanging on his T-shirt collar; out of his photo-shoot couture and into some shorts, his accent is pure New Zealand. And most of all, he's so ... nice.
You're waiting for the trap to spring.
He says, "What I didn't realize was how much of myself I was putting into the role. Obviously, not in terms of flying and lasering ..." When it's pointed out that that's exactly what somebody who secretly could do those things would say, he gives an actual mwah-ha-ha evil laugh. "But without going into specifics of me, in terms of the emotional stuff, the closer I can make things to myself, the more I can tap into something that's real."
