The Boys returns to Amazon for its second season on September 4th with three episodes, while new instalments will then be released over the following five weeks. After the show's critically acclaimed first year, there's a huge amount of excitement surrounding this next batch of episodes, and after watching the first few chapters, we promise you that you're in for a real treat.
You can check out our review next week, but in the meantime, we're sharing some excerpts from our recent conversations with the cast and crew of The Boys after participating in a series of roundtable interviews last month. Among those we spoke to were Antony Starr, who plays the out of control leader of The Seven, and series newcomer Aya Cash, who takes on the role of Stormfront.
Without getting into spoilers for those first few episodes of season two, both characters often seem irredeemable as we follow their exploits in The Boys, and we asked Starr and Cash how challenging it is to play "superheroes" who appear to be without a decent side of any sort.
Here's what Starr had to say about his take on Homelander:
"There’s no such thing as 100% light or 100% dark, right? And, if there is, you very quickly enter into the moustache twirling world of old school TV, film, and comic book villains; the quintessential bad guys that do nothing else. I think what makes these characters more interesting and what we’ve tried to dig into with Eric Kripke, our showrunner and lead writer, is the reason why. Why do people do what they do?
"In season one, we see that Homelander isn’t doing what he’s doing because ‘Mwha-ha-ha, it’s good to be bad,' it’s because he’s deeply, deeply traumatised because he was raised like a lab rat and doesn’t understand how to relate to people or other superheroes or anyone in a way that’s functional or what we would deem as normal. I think looking at the reason why is crucial for us to get away from falling into those pitfalls of one or two-dimensional characters who have a very short shelf life. If you have a character that’s only one note, there’s only so much you can do with it before it runs out of juice.
"I know that Homelander can pretty much go anywhere and I would say the same with Aya’s character. They cast a lovely person and asked her to be bad, which I think is the right way to go because if they cast a bitch and asked her to be nice, it doesn’t have the same effect. Aya came in and her character is a force. It was so much fun to be on the tennis court with her and hit the ball. It was great having someone who really wanted to work on the nuance and relationship and dig deeper than the quintessential bad guys."
Cash would elaborate on that last point, shedding a little more light on Stormfront and explaining that the character - who was actually portrayed as a male in the comic books - is the opposite of her past role. "Stormfront’s interesting because I’m used to playing 'bad girl' characters, meaning deeply traumatised or self-destructive women who you don't necessarily see as the girl next door with the heart of gold, but are This is sort of the opposite."
"She’s almost the ballsy girl next door with a heart of acid, so that’s a really interesting dynamic and I’m used to with characters seeing the other switch," Cash continued, "but it’s really fun to play a character you even agree with sometimes, but her intentions are not good."
Trust us when we say there are some interesting twists in store for both Homelander and Stormfront moving into season two of The Boys, and you can check out the trailer for that below: