The Boys Season 4 poster reveals a stoic Homelander

Antony Starr has done such an amazing job portraying John/Homelander on The Boys that fans believe he deserves an Emmy nomination. However, the actor says he is not too concerned about awards.

“I’m not worried about it, man,” Starr told Rolling Stone when asked to share his thoughts about the awards buzz surrounding his character. “As I’ve gotten older, my ambitions have changed. And I realize the mechanics behind those things, the politics and all of that. And I think, good luck to everyone, but yeah, that’s not what drives me.”

Homelander is the powerful and sinister leader of the superhero group known as The Seven. He was raised in a Vought lab, which had a profound psychological impact on him. In The Boys Season 4, John returns to the lab where he was tortured as a child to seek revenge on its staff. One of the character’s signature quirks is his unexpected milk fetish, which Starr and the show’s creator Eric Kripke have embraced as a running gag.

Parallels To The Real World Are Character Driven

However, Starr does not enjoy the subtle links Homelander has to Donald Trump. “It’s interesting because that was something that came up a lot,” Starr told Rolling Stone. “For me, it’s a bit of a red herring because if we strictly stayed in that lane, the character would be one- or two-dimensional, and we wanted to create something a bit more layered than that. We wanted more than a cardboard cutout. It’s the same way that you could look at it like Superman and just go bad.”

“But let me put it this way. Whatever parallels there are to the real world, it has to be driven by our characters,” Starr continued. “The narrative has to be driven by the needs of the character. So yeah, obviously, there’s an election in the show, and there’s a real election this year. But that’s actually a really natural progression from Homelander’s perspective, because we’ve been dabbling in politics and trying to get in the military from Season 1.”

Homelander standing arms outstretched in a scene from The Boys

The fifth season of The Boys will have a lot in store for fans as Paul Reiser is set to reprise his role as The Legend. Another actor who will appear in The Boys final season is Jared Padalecki. Series creator Eric Kripke recently addressed the cameo, saying that it will probably “break the internet” and “would destroy much of the world,” which the showrunner finds appealing.

All four seasons of The Boys are streaming on Prime Video.