Antony Starr

Watch what Antony Starr does with his mouth. As Homelander in The Boys (2019–2026) the smile arrives for the cameras and the children, holds a beat too long, and goes out the moment nobody useful is looking. Underneath it the jaw is working. He plays the most powerful man in the world as someone who has never been told no and is still, somewhere, braced for it, which is why the character frightens rather than merely appals. We were properly frightened by him in a first-season scene where he stands in a room and does nothing, letting another person work out what he could do if he chose. That is not an effect. It is an actor holding still.

He came to the part by a long road through television. He began with guest parts in New Zealand in the mid-1990s, on Xena: Warrior Princess and Shortland Street, and became known at home playing twins in Outrageous Fortune (2005–2010), both brothers at once. Leading roles in Australian television followed, then Banshee (2013–2016), in which his Lucas Hood is a man living as someone he is not. He was already, that early, playing one man who is two. Homelander is the same trick at full stretch: a man performing a hero with the whole country as audience.

What works is the smallness. Starr does menace with the eyes, the jaw and the pause rather than the voice, so that a character drawn as a cartoon is played as a man, and the insecurity is always visible under the threat. Eric Kripke's writing gives him the situations and Karl Urban, his co-star, gives him someone to hate. The show around them is cruder than it is clever and runs long; Starr is the reason to stay. His own account of the method is disarming: "Sometimes it’s as simple as, well, what would Superman do? And do the opposite." It is more than that, but it is a fair place to start.

The reservation is the obvious one. Since Banshee he has mostly been cast as dangerous men wearing a mask of charm or normality, and he is so good at it that the offers will keep coming. The supporting film roles since, in Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023) and Cobweb (2023), have not tested anything new. The series is finished. Somebody should give him a decent, dull man and see whether the jaw stays still.