It’s hard to imagine anyone but Antony Starr embodying the chilling, homicidal Homelander on The Boys. Yet the New Zealand actor wasn’t initially sold on the role. In a 2020 interview with Metro, the cast of the edgy superhero series shared their audition experiences, and Starr admitted he had almost dismissed the idea entirely, thinking he didn’t fit the traditional superhero mold.
At the time, Starr was a busy actor, having started with small parts on Xena: Warrior Princess and moving on to major roles on Australian TV shows such as Mercy Peak, Outrageous Fortune, and Tricky Business. His breakthrough in the U.S. came in 2013 with the leading role on Showtime’s crime drama Banshee. Despite this success, when the opportunity to audition for The Boys arose, he almost passed on it.
Antony Starr explained that his agents kept sending him the pilot script and urging him to audition, but he kept brushing them off. He was busy and, seeing it was a superhero show, assumed he didn’t stand a chance. He told Metro:
"So I didn't look at it for a week-and-a-half and then I saw it was a superhero thing, and I thought, 'They're not going to pick me anyway, I'm not made for that. Henry Cavill's 12 feet tall, built like a 12-foot brick s**t house, and he's wonderful, handsome and charming – I'm not going to get that.'"
Though Starr is leaner than Cavill, he isn’t drastically shorter, and superhero costumes usually include padding. Still, his doubts lingered. Eventually, frustrated by his reps’ persistence, he sat down in his dressing room during another project and filmed an audition on his iPad “almost out of spite.”
That tape reached series executive producer and showrunner Eric Kripke, who loved it.
Once Antony Starr gave the script a proper look, he realized The Boys wasn’t your typical superhero story, and he decided to fully commit. He even had the behind-the-scenes crew record his screen test in a basement he described as a place “that looks like the Blair Witch would get you.” While that might seem at odds with the polished, all-American façade Homelander projects, it turned out to be the perfect setting for capturing the character’s dark, tortured essence.
