Antony Starr’s Homelander Needs An Emmy For ‘The Boys’

Hannibal Lecter. Darth Vader. The Joker.

Homelander?

Yeah, it’s time to have that conversation. Here in the third season of The Boys on Amazon Prime, it has become very clear that Homelander is one of the best movie or TV villains in recent pop culture history, and deserves to be up there with many of the all-time onscreen greats.

This is of course thanks to Antony Starr’s incredible performance as the demented superhero, an inverse Superman who in the current season, is now doing his best Donald Trump impression fighting against the mainstream media and “cancel culture.”

Starr first caught my eye as Sheriff Lucas Hood in Banshee, the darkly violent Cinemax series where he’s the hero rather than a villain, albeit still a brutal one. But his turn as Homelander on The Boys has been his breakout moment, and it’s about time his work was recognized, as few other performances even compare to what Starr is doing year after year here.

Who is his competition? That’s the other part of this.

The Boys is submitted to the Emmys as a drama. It was actually nominated for Best Drama in 2021, so the Emmys aren’t totally blind to it. It didn’t win, but it also indicates where Starr would be competing (while The Boys has funny moments, I definitely wouldn’t think of it as a “comedy” overall).

Should Homelander be considered the “lead” of the series? While it’s an ensemble cast, that doesn’t mean anything, really. It really just depends on how the show would want to play it. Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox are both considered Lead Actors in Succession. But when Peter Dinklage went on his Emmy tear as Tyrion Lannister, that was in the Best Supporting role.

I would say to have a better chance at landing on the list, they should submit Starr for Best Supporting. Lead Actor may just be too stacked, and considering he’s already been ignored, I wouldn’t put him against the Succession guys, Jason Bateman from Ozark, Bob Odenkirk from Better Call Saul or Lee Jung-jae from Squid Game.

But it is absolutely absurd that Variety has their 2022 “predictions” lists out, and out of close to 100 names on each list, no one from The Boys is there, and definitely not Antony Starr. And these are the types of industry people who do the Emmy nominations, so clearly, it’s an uphill battle.

It’s just wild though, that Starr can’t even be on the list when you look at say, last year’s Best Supporting Actor nominees:

• Tobias Menzies (The Crown, winner)
• Giancarlo Esposito (The Mandalorian)
• O-T Fagbenle (The Handmaid’s Tale)
• John Lithgow (Perry Mason)
• Max Minghella (The Handmaid’s Tale)
• Chris Sullivan (This is Us)
• Bradley Whitford (The Handmaid’s Tale)
• Michael K. Williams (Lovecraft Country).

Three, three spots for The Handmaid’s Tale during a season that wasn’t even good! Incredible. Again, nominations like this are mostly internal Hollywood politics, but there’s a weird split here. I don’t get how The Boys itself can actually land a Best Drama nomination, but one of the hurricane forces within it, Anthony Starr, isn’t even consider in a list of hundreds of names by a leading Hollywood press outlet. Just bizarre.

Give him a nomination and at this rate, given him the statue. He deserves it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.