Antony Starr from The Boys is almost too good at playing Homelander

One of the hardest things to understand from the outside, if you’re part of a group that follows a cult of personality, is how intoxicating a personality can be. A charismatic presence that you devote time to on a regular basis – say, every Sunday morning, or better yet, every evening after dinner – can be immensely seductive. Television, which focuses on building a relationship with the viewer over time, can use this as a powerful tool to get its message across. Sometimes, with the right actor to bring the material to life, it can be a little seductive. to good at getting his point across. For example, consider Antony Starr’s unique performance in The young as super fascist Homelander.

It’s worth taking a moment to think about how difficult the task would have been for any actor to play Homelander. Considering the source material – which I would strongly recommend you do, as it hasn’t aged particularly well in many ways – Homelander doesn’t exactly seem like a character that could played by a living person. He is essentially a caricature, having more in common with political cartoons than with the comparatively grounded aesthetic of contemporary comic book superheroes. There is no humanity in the character as imagined by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson; he is a means to an (often prurient) end.

Antony Starr, on the other hand, seemed to understand the character from the first moment he appeared on screen, bringing a new dimension to what is crudely depicted on the comic page. He knew how to produce a smile so bright that you don’t notice Homelander’s dead eyes behind it unless you look for it. He knows how to act with a tension born of deep insecurity, or how to purse his lips in a way that makes it clear that he finds it more annoying to utter a threat than to simply repeat it and leave the threat implicit. If he played a wind instrument, he would have an excellent mouthpiece.

The young doesn’t work without Antony Starr. The New Zealand actor, who previously starred in the cult action series bansheeplays a character who could end the series’ conflict between the Seven superhumans and Billy Butcher’s ragtag resistance movement of normal people at any time, and so he must regularly portray a character who believably gets in his own way or has psychological complexes that would make an all-powerful man manipulable.

In other words, Starr’s portrayal does one of the most dangerous things you can do in a story about such an obviously evil man: It makes him sympathetic. Understandable. “Wisdom of the Ages,” the latest episode of The youngpicks up on a thread in the character’s backstory, namely how he was experimented on as a child and mentally broken so that he could be used as a tool by the megacorporation that created him. It’s heartbreaking how it backfires, as this broken man finds that he now has influence over an equally broken public that is looking for a charismatic strongman like him to empower them to commit acts of violence.

The youngHowever, is able to indulge in moments we don’t often see from real-life fascist rulers when they’re not performing in front of a crowd of adoring fans. Homelander’s story in “Wisdom of the Ages” revolves around Homelander taking out his increasing feelings of powerlessness as head of Vought on the lab workers who created him, murdering them all in a manner reminiscent of the casual cruelty they showed him when he was just a test subject for them.

In these scenes, Antony Starr walks the thread, conveying the horror of what Homelander endured as a boy named John, and also the even more monstrous being he is today. Starr plays these scenes as a horror movie villain, full of cruel desires and sneering. The ease with which Starr can slip into this mode – with which he keeps finding shades that are pathetic, funny, frustrating, seething, dangerous – is frankly mind-boggling. To the viewer who can see the whole picture, Homelander is a villain through and through. But within the fiction of The young? This Homelander is learning the power he has. And Antony Starr made me want to see this through, no matter how horribly it ends. The young in stock.

New episodes of The young Drop on Thursdays.