Antony Starr says Homelander wouldn’t beat his ‘G20’ villain

Antony Starr swaps Vought International for the G20 Summit in G20, his new action thriller with Viola Davis.

Best known for his role as Homelander on The Boys, the actor suits up to play a different type of antagonistic patriot in director Patricia Riggen’s action film: Rutledge, a disillusioned military veteran turned crypto bro who takes a group of world leaders, including Davis’ president of the United States, hostage during the annual G20 Summit as part of a larger campaign to destabilize the world economy.

“Bad guys don’t know that they’re bad,” Starr tells Entertainment Weekly of the villainous role. “These characters are doing what they’re doing because they believe it’s the best thing to do. Not many people walk around doing things because they think it’s the wrong thing. They don’t think we’re doing the right thing … Homelander, not so much, but this character in this movie has a pretty compelling case.”

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Indeed, Rutledge believes the powers that be are greedily swindling the common folk. “I agree with his grievances in principle. I just think the method is terrible,” he continues. “I do think this is a guy who has an incredibly strong drive to make change. I tried to anchor [the performance] in something that was very human, like the loss of family and not being able to function when he got back from war because of PTSD. I think that pain is what’s driving him, and it made the character a lot of fun to play.” 

Would Homelander stand a chance against Rutledge in a battle of wits, though? They “would be a terrible duo,” Starr says. “Rutledge, I think he’s smart enough that he would grease Homelander up and know how to manipulate him. He would be like— do you remember in Lord of the Rings, Gríma Wormtongue, that got in the king’s ear? He was just whispering, like, magic in his ear. It’d be like that. I think he would be like a little snake in Homelander’s ear — wrapped around his arm, whispering in his ear.”

Homelander aside, Rutledge does find a formidable foe in the form of Davis’s President Danielle Sutton. Nail-biting fight sequences punctuate the thriller, and Starr had a blast throwing it down with Davis. Like his costar, he insisted on doing most of his own stunts — this despite coming into production with an unrelated meniscus tear in his knee. The pause in production due to the dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, however, allowed it to heal once production resumed, and all was well — “until the very last day,” Starr says. “And I tweaked it.”

It occurred during a climactic sequence aboard a helicopter with Davis and her onscreen daughter, played by Marsai Martin. “It was through my own error,” he says. “I just put my foot in the wrong place, and it twisted a little bit.” The stunt portion of the pulsating helicopter sequence, which features a lot of spinning, was actually one of the few that Starr wasn’t allowed to do. “I was like, ‘I can do that, just got to duck under the back of the helicopter when it’s swinging around,'” he says. “Oh my God. My stunt double was amazing. He waited ’til the very last second. I was like, he’s going to get hit. It was so perfectly executed. And I’m like, you know what? I’m more than happy to let these guys shine. I would’ve been knocked out in the first pass.” 

Though G20 concerns itself with crypto and other forms of tech, please do not ask Starr to explain it to you. “Even the people that know about crypto can’t really explain crypto to someone that doesn’t know about crypto,” Starr quips. “I’ve had about five people try and explain it. All knowledgeable people, none of them have been able to make it make sense to me. Now, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I’m not the bluntest, either. I think if I talk more, I’ll just keep proving the same point.”

G20 drops on April 10 on Prime Video.