It’s been over a week since Episode 4 of “The Boys” Season 4 premiered on Amazon Prime Video, and fans are still reeling from the horrific mess of corpses Homelander (Antony Starr) left in the Vought Tower labs’ “bad room” following his major return to his old haunts.
The episode revealed the extent to which Homelander hasn’t recovered from the botched experiments performed on him as a lab-created supe kid, thanks in part to Starr’s own suggestions for how Homelander should interact with the Vought employees who were the closest thing he had to family as a child — and who were also his torturers.
“When that episode script came out, I saw the sequence of scenes and I went to [showrunner Eric Kripke] and we retooled them a little bit just to give more freedom on the day,” Starr told Variety. “Originally, they were scripted very specifically. There wasn’t a lot of room for me to move on the day. I went to Eric and I said, ‘I think there’s other places we can go and that I’d like to try and go.’ So we rejigged things. Eric’s awesome, he is so open, and so together we nutted out a few scenes. On the day it was just about showing up and going for it and just seeing what worked and what didn’t. I wanted those scenes to be very conflicted. On the one hand, there was some sense of nostalgia and a little melancholy and incredible trauma coming up, but also just a whole mix of different things. I didn’t know when and where and how, so we created a template that we could just go into those days and in that environment and just go for it.”
All of that preparing for how to have a gory mental breakdown on television resulted in “It was actually really fun.”
“As dark and fucked up as that appears now, that was probably one of the most pleasurable sequences I’ve had on the show,” he joked.” “I had a blast doing it. It can’t get more weirder or darker for me, and I adore it. We got to do things on screen that we never get to do in real life, which was a lot of fun.”
With Episode 5 of “The Boys” Season 4 premiering on Thursday, we’ll soon find out if this season remains wicked and twisted enough for Starr from here.
