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At this point, it feels almost impossible to imagine anyone other than Antony Starr playing the homicidally-inclined Homelander on the “The Boys.” But the New Zealand-born actor wasn’t originally all that interested in the role. In a 2020 interview with Metro, the actors who star on the subversive superhero series all shared their stories of auditioning and being cast, and Starr revealed that he had initially shrugged off the idea of even trying out because he believed he wasn’t built like the superheroes portrayed on the big screen.
Starr was a busy actor when “The Boys” was being cast, having started his career with bit parts on “Xena: Warrior Princess” before getting major roles on Australian television in shows like “Mercy Peak,” “Outrageous Fortune,” and “Tricky Business.” He hit stateside success in 2013 in the starring role on the hit Showtime crime drama “Banshee.” He later Starr ended up auditioning for the skewed superhero series and the rest worked out — and gave us one of the best television performances in recent memory, but he almost sabotaged it all from the start.
Starr never thought he would make it on a superhero show
Cinemax
According to Starr, his representatives kept sending him the script for “The Boys” pilot and telling him to audition, and he repeatedly blew them off. He said that he was working pretty constantly at the time and when he noticed it was a superhero show, he felt he was extremely unlikely to get the role. 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.”
While Starr is definitely a little leaner than Cavill, he’s not that much shorter than the former Superman, and all of those superhero suits have padding built-in. Still, he was hesitant. When his reps continued to pester him about auditioning, however, he sat down in his dressing room on the project he was doing at the time and filmed an audition then and there on his iPad “almost out of spite.”
The audition tape made it to series executive producer and showrunner Eric Kripke, who loved it.
Once Starr took some time to read the script, he realized the series wasn’t just another straightforward take on superheroes, and he wanted to “put some time and energy into” trying to get the role. He said he “got the behind-the-scenes guys to record my screen test in a basement that looks like the Blair Witch would get you.” While that might seem wildly out of place for the clean-cut, high-end consumer-based Americana that Homelander usually tries to project, it wound up being pretty perfect, given the character’s tortured background.
The rest? Homelander history.
