In a Rolling Stone interview, The Boys’ Antony Starr (Outrageous Fortune, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant) reveals how Homelander’s milk fetish was conceived and evolved in the show. Starr explains that the idea of Homelander’s milk fetish originated in the scripts written by the show’s writing team. He specifies that it wasn’t something he came up with.

Starr said, “Full credit to the writing team on this, because it was so weird.”

Starr then describes the fetish’s first appearance on the show, explaining that it began in a scene where Homelander uses his X-ray vision to look at Madelyn Stillwell, his “Oedipal mummy figure” while she’s breastfeeding. Starr describes Homelander as “pining” and “having a jealous relationship with the baby.” Then, at the beginning of the second season, Homelander finds some of her breast milk in a freezer. He heats it up with his laser vision and starts drinking it before getting caught. 

“It was so funny and weird,” he said to Rolling Stone. “I think I sent Eric an email after that scene going, ‘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.”

Eric Kripke (Supernatural, Timeless) developed the superhero satire series for Prime Video. Kripke also serves as executive producer, director and head writer. In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Kripke adds further insight into Homelander’s characterization, revealing that he’s “always been a Trump analogue.”

“I’ll admit to being a little more bald this season than I have in past seasons,” Kripke confessed. “But the world is getting more coarse and less elegant. The urgency of our team’s writing reflects that. We’re angrier and more scared as the years go on, so that is just being reflected in our writing.” 

Kripke continues in the interview, “He has this really combustible mix of complete weakness and insecurity, and just horrible power and ambition, and it’s just such a deadly combo… All he ever wants is to be the most powerful person he can be, even though he’s completely inadequate in his abilities to handle it. So it’s white-male victimization and unchecked ambition. And those issues just happened to reflect the guy who, it’s just still surreal to say it, was fucking president of the United States. And it’s a bigger issue than just Trump. The more awful public figures act, the more fans they seem to be getting. That’s a phenomenon that we wanted to explore, that Homelander is realizing that he can actually show them who he really is and they’ll love him for it.”

Starr, however, finds this comparison somewhat misleading. According to Rolling Stone, he believes that if Homelander were strictly portrayed as a Trump analogue, the character would lack depth and be overly simplistic.

“We’re looking at a guy who’s physically the strongest man in the world,” Starr explained. “Who I’ve always looked at as the weakest character in the show because emotionally, psychologically, he’s just completely deficient. He’s like a 12-year-old. And in some ways, less than.”

Starr continued, “I think that makes the character a little more empathetic, because he’s mentally ill. The guy’s damaged, he’s been through a hell of a lot.”

“We all struggle … I’m interested in how we function, what damage does to us,” the actor revealed to Rolling Stone. “That’s probably why people strangely empathize with the character. Some people got it completely wrong at one point and were championing him like he was the hero and that was a bad thing… He should not be anyone’s real hero, but I do get a lot of people saying that they have very conflicted feelings about him because he does all this horrible stuff, yet he’s desperately trying to be a good father. He genuinely loves the kid. He just doesn’t know how. Because how would he? He’s never been loved.”

The Boys season four releases new episodes on Prime Video every Thursday.