One of the most highly watched Amazon Prime series, “The Boys” has taken over the superhero franchises with its gruesome and appalling sequences. But one aspect of the show that intrigued fans the most was the series’ main antagonist’ fetish…which happens to be milk (quite diabolical innit?)
Homelander from the get go of the series has been looked at as this vengeful and maniacal of a person. Why he does what he does is almost imperceivable. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the anti-superhero star explained the origins of the quirky milk obsession that had the whole world in absolute shambles.
Reflecting on this oddball trait in an interview with "Rolling Stone", Starr recounted how the peculiar fixation first appeared in the scripts, crediting the writing team for its bizarre brilliance. “So my memory is it came up in the scripts — full credit to the writing team on this, because it was so weird,” he recalled to Rolling Stone. “It started with X-ray visioning my Oedipal mummy figure [Madelyn Stillwell as played by Elisabeth Shue] while she was breastfeeding, and me pining like that and having a jealous relationship with the baby. And then at the start of Season Two, I found some of her … Homelander found some of her breast milk in a freezer and lasers it, starts drinking it, gets caught.”
Starr found this so amusing and strange that he immediately emailed showrunner Eric Kripke, urging, "Dude, we gotta get as much milk in this show as possible. This is gonna be like a little motif or a signature thing. Like, we have to do it.’ And he was like, ‘One step ahead of you, brother. I’m putting it in everything.’ And so now every opportunity we get, the milk thing comes out. We don’t have to do anything with it, either. If I just look at someone and sip milk, there’s a twist to it. It’s become a really fun thing. The fans have really glommed on to it. And enjoyed it.”
In Season 3, the milk obsession reached a new level in the episode "Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed," where Homelander milks a cow on a farmhouse and drinks from a bucket, accentuating the running joke's absurdity.
"The Boys", based on the comic book series, showcases Starr as Homelander, the menacing leader of a group of superheroes controlled by a corrupt corporation. The New Zealand actor also discussed the frequent comparisons between his "psychopathic narcissist" character and Donald Trump.
Addressing this, Starr said, “It’s interesting because that was something that came up a lot. 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,” he explained. “We wanted more than a cardboard cutout. It’s the same way that you could look at it like Superman and just go bad. I don’t want to do that. I want to start from the ground up and build a human being that was, OK, how was he raised? He was raised in a lab. What damage did that do? In Season Four, we really get into it. ‘Homecoming’ is a fun episode.
Starr emphasized that any parallels to the real world must be driven by character needs and the narrative. 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 one. So there’s always been those elements that parallel the real world. But I feel like they always relate well to the show. It’s not like just, oh yeah, we want to stick that in for no other reason than just to poke fun at something in the real world,”
Catch new episodes of "The Boys" Season 4, available for streaming Thursdays on Prime Video.
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