It’s been nearly a week since Episode 4 of “The Boys” Season 4 dropped on Amazon’s Prime Video, and fans are still reeling from the bloody mess of corpses Homelander (Antony Starr) left in the Vought Tower labs’ “bad room” after his big return to his old stomping grounds.
The episode revealed exactly the extent to which Homelander hasn’t recovered from the messed-up experiments conducted on him as a lab-created supe kid, thanks in part to Starr’s own suggestions for how Homelander would interact with the Vought employees who were the closest things 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.”
The result of all that planning for how to have a bloody mental breakdown on screen: “It was actually really fun.”
With Episode 5 of “The Boys” Season 4 dropping Thursday, we’ll soon find out if this season stays sick and twisted enough for Starr from here.
