[COLUMN] What The Boys Gets Right About Homelander | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the most recent episode of The Boys, which is currently streaming its final season on Prime Video. I have yet to see the finale, but I’m quite enjoying the final season, which continues to work as one of the less subtle pop culture snapshots of the current moment.

On The Boys, the superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is many things. He is a villain. He is a narcissist. He is a monster. He has even declared himself God. However, one of the more notable aspects of Homelander’s character is what he isn’t: he is not especially “jacked.”

Of course, like any actor, Starr works hard to maintain his physique. In a recent interview with Men’s Health, he explained that the production team put him in a corset during the first season, leading him to train “like crazy for two weeks” to get into the right shape. However, as Homelander, underneath the character’s patriotic blue muscle suit, Starr is quite skinny. The show has made a point of emphasizing this at several points, most recently with the character bathing in milk.

This is not how superheroes tend to look on screen, particularly over the past couple of decades. Since the explosion of the superhero genre, standards of masculine beauty on screen have shifted dramatically, with the ideal male form coming to look like a Dorito chip – a narrow waist leading to broad shoulders. Even for actors who keep their shirts on in superhero roles, like Paul Rudd or Kumail Nanjiani, the trend has been towards insane levels of musculature.

This trend has been much-discussed. These muscles are largely cosmetic, built for show not for strength. This fixation on male bodies has paradoxically been paired with an increasing sexlessness in mainstream cinema. These beauty standards place a tremendous strain on the actors in question, with Hugh Jackman dehydrating himself for a day and a half to prepare for Logan and Zac Efron talking about how his body transformation for Baywatch led to insomnia and depression.

To get into the internal logic of superheroes, it does not necessarily make sense for superheroes to have these sorts of bodies. After all, most superheroes move in ways that actively defy the laws of biology or physics, so there is no need to even pretend that their gifts require them to be in that sort of absurd physical shape. Spider-Man is a gangly teenager who can stick to walls and has the proportionate strength of a spider, so Tom Holland probably doesn’t need to show off his abs.

Still, these bodies serve as effective visual shorthand. Whether correctly or not, audiences instinctively draw a connection between visible musculature and strength, with that logic applying even to the imaginary world of superheroes. If a character is expected to be super strong, the visual shorthand has become that they should be heavily muscled. It is an instinctive and intuitive thing, even if it never applied to older superhero actors like Michael Keaton.

Homelander is very obviously a pastiche of the iconic and perhaps defining superhero Superman. Superman is an alien with a unique physiology, but in recent years he has been portrayed as very buff, with actors like Henry Cavill or David Corenswet talking about their workout regimes. On some level, the character of Homelander himself – or his original handlers – understand this. Homelander’s costume is designed to create the impression of a muscled and chiseled physique.

As such, Homelander’s relative scrawniness is a well-observed choice on the part the production team working on The Boys. The show has never been especially subtle. It often veers aggressively towards the crass and the outlandish. This has perhaps presented a problem for the show in recent years, as its outlandish swings struggle to keep pace with reality. Homelander declaring himself to be God might have been a big twist – if Donald Trump hadn’t beaten him to the punch by a few days.

However, while Homelander’s scrawny physique is consistent across the run of the show, dating back to at least the third season, the series has never really felt the need to draw attention to it. Instead it leaves this as a detail for the audience to pick up on their own. It’s a really deft piece of visual storytelling that reveals a lot about Homelander as a character. He is still in many ways the scrawny abused test subject created by Vought all those years ago. He certainly craves his protein.

However, the choice feels like more than a subtle piece of character work. It also feels like the show engaging with its own fandom. Homelander is an explicitly fascist character, a would-be dictator with heat vision and super strength. It is quite common for characters like this to accrue an ironic fandom among real-life right-wing extremists. There are, for example, Star Wars fans who unironically root for the Empire because of their cool fascist aesthetic.

There has been a lot of recent discourse about the perceived death of “media literacy”, in particular the difficulty that some viewers have in parsing a work’s opinion about a given character or subject. It feels like a significant amount of modern media is crafted to avoid any potential misreading. Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, for example, feels like an iteration on the central ideas of Goodfellas, but stripping away the cool aesthetics that led to an enthusiastic fandom for the mobsters in the film.

This is not a unique phenomenon. Critic Emily Nussbaum coined the term “bad fan” to apply to the viewers who watched Breaking Bad and unequivocally supported Walter White (Bryan Cranston). During press for the Malcolm in the Middle revival, Life is Unfair, Cranston had to politely but firmly explain why Walter White was not a cool dude to his on-screen son, Frankie Muniz. It is undoubtedly frustrating for creators to have to keep clarifying what is explicit within the text.

Showrunner Eric Kripke has talked about how strange it is to think that somebody might watch The Boys and empathize with Homelander. “The show is many things,” Kripke argued in 2024. “Subtle is not one of them. If you, for instance, think Homelander's a hero, I just don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you.” However, there was a very strong vocal online following of the show built around supporting Homelander, which the show has worked hard to shed, consistently.

The show’s frustration with these viewers makes a great deal of sense. After all, this weird fandom around Homelander does not exist in a vacuum. Homelander has inevitably been drawn into the culture wars, particularly in the context of an emerging radical right-wing anti-democratic movement in the United States. Antony Starr has openly mocked fans who cosplayed as Homelander at Donald Trump rallies, with Kripke asking, “Are they actually watching the show?”

There is an interesting tension. These right-wing fans gravitate to Homelander despite his monstrosity because he embodies a certain kind of fascistic ideal: he is a superstrong blonde-haired blue-eyed authority figure. He is a power fantasy, like any superhero, and his cruelty and his pettiness might actually appeal to an audience for whom, in the immortal words of Adam Serwer, “the cruelty is the point.” What makes him a good villain for the show makes him a good icon for these people.

And Homelander is a good villain. It is a very fine tightrope for the show to walk. For The Boys to work, Homelander needs to be a credible threat. So far in the final season, he has already singlehandedly dispatched series regulars A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) and Firecracker (Valorie Curry). He almost beat his own son (Cameron Crovetti) to death, in one of the season’s less subtle religious metaphors. Even the characters on The Boys who do not respect Homelander still fear him.

The show has done a remarkable job of making Homelander a credible threat while also finding a way to turn that right-wing fandom off the character. The scrawniness is undoubtedly one part of it, mocking the right-wing’s fixation on masculine body image. His obsession with breast milk, literally infantilizing him, is another. It isn’t just that The Boys makes Homelander pathetic, it is that it makes him laughable, while still making him terrifying.

This is obvious even within “One-Shots”, the episode in which Homelander kills Firecracker by ramming her head through the wing of a sculpture of an eagle. In that same episode, one of the vignettes is told from the perspective of Terror (Mister Bentley), the British Bulldog owned by Homelander’s arch enemy William “Billy” Butcher (Karl Urban). Throughout that sequence, the audience is invited into Terror’s dreams.

In Terror’s dreams, the dog imagines Homelander presenting himself sexually, as Terror mercilessly humps a stuffed toy crafted in Homelander’s image. It’s a sequence that is very true to the crass and vulgar sensibility of The Boys, as Homelander dangles a cartoonishly large turkey leg for the dog. “You want some turkey?” Homelander teases, bending over. “Well, first, you got to fuck me. Then I’ll give you the turkey.”

It is a sequence that very effectively plays the audience’s understanding of Homelander’s image. Even if that is not really Homelander, it is still Antony Starr in the costume. Reducing this big burly strong man to the sex toy of a horny old dog is a goofy gag, but it also feels calculated to undermine any right-wing conception of Homelander as a strong man power fantasy. It is a very deft understanding of the power of the image.

In some ways, The Boys has learned from the misaimed fandoms around projects like Goodfellas or Breaking Bad, from viewers who engage more readily with the aesthetics of a work than the actual text. Within the text of The Boys, Homelander is an existential threat. However, instead of embracing the fetishistic fascist imagery that would typically accompany such a villain, The Boys takes Homelander’s threats at face value but presents him in a manner impossible to take seriously.

It’s easy to criticize The Boys for being too heavy-handed or on-the-nose, but there is something oddly appealing in its straightforwardness, particularly at a time when it feels like nothing makes any sense. It is a show that is always very clear in what it is trying to communicate to its audience – and, crucially, what it doesn’t want to communicate.