Antony Starr Almost Talked Himself Out of Playing Homelander Because of Henry Cavill

‘The Boys‘ turned the superhero genre inside out, and Homelander quickly became one of the most unsettling villains on television. The Prime Video series wrapped after five seasons, with Homelander getting an ending built around humiliation rather than a heroic defeat. Antony Starr’s performance in the role is now treated as inseparable from the character, the kind of casting choice that feels obvious in hindsight.

Before stepping into the cape, Starr was a working actor known for the gritty Cinemax drama ‘Banshee,’ juggling steady jobs rather than chasing comic book franchises. When his representatives first sent over the pilot script for ‘The Boys,’ Starr was busy working almost every hour available and brushed the project aside for more than a week before his team followed up. He had no particular interest in joining another superhero adaptation, especially one he assumed would never go his way.

That hesitation came down to Starr simply not believing he looked the part. He felt he wasn’t handsome or imposing enough to play a superhero, especially with Henry Cavill setting the physical bar for what a “Supe” was supposed to look like. “I kept avoiding it until I finally put a tape down, almost out of spite.”

Once his reps kept pushing, Starr finally gave in during a break from another job. “I went to my trailer, at lunchtime, and got my iPad out and just literally spat an audition out.” It was a quick, unpolished tape by his own description, filmed with almost no expectation that it would lead anywhere.

Starr’s doubts were rooted in a direct comparison to the Man of Steel himself. “So I didn’t look at it for a week-and-a-half and then I saw it was a superhero thing, and I thought, ‘They’re not going to pick me anyway, I’m not made for that. Henry Cavill’s 12 feet tall, built like a 12-foot brick s**t house, and he’s wonderful, handsome and charming. I’m not going to get that.'”

The tape eventually made its way to executive producer and showrunner Eric Kripke, who loved what he saw right away. That response changed Starr’s outlook entirely, prompting him to actually sit down and read the full script, after which he realized the project was genuinely good and worth putting real time and energy into.

Starr ended up not just landing Homelander but redefining him, turning a comic book villain into one of the most discussed antiheroes of the streaming era. He transformed the character into a complex figure that audiences loved to hate, leaving a lasting mark on the superhero genre well beyond the show’s five season run. The actor who once assumed he had no shot at a superhero role wound up shaping how an entire generation pictures one going wrong.

It’s hard to imagine anyone else delivering Homelander’s mix of menace and insecurity the way Starr did, all while convinced for over a week that the part belonged to someone built more like Henry Cavill. Does knowing how close Starr came to skipping that audition change how you watch his Homelander now, or does it just make the performance hit even harder in hindsight.