Antony Starr

The price of two faces

Antony Starr's face doesn't invite trust.

There is something unsettling about the way he holds your gaze on camera. Long before the whole world knew his name in 2019, the actor had already spent decades refining a dry, physical style in his native New Zealand. He never chased global fame desperately. He preferred to hone his craft from the margins of Oceanic television.

His first big breakthrough came with Outrageous Fortune in 2005. In this series he played twin brothers with opposite personalities over six seasons. It was an exercise in technical endurance that required him to shoot double shifts and figure out how to split his own identity in front of the mirror.

And the effort paid off.

That work earned him recognition at home, but the leap to the United States was not immediate. Starr did not fit Hollywood's traditional leading-man mold. His appeal was too sharp and his energy came across as somewhat shady for the romantic comedies of the era.

Violence as a Language

In 2013, the cable network Cinemax gave him the role of Lucas Hood in Banshee. The premise was pure high-end B-movie thrills: an ex-convict impersonates a sheriff in a small Pennsylvania town. Starr took on a demanding production that required exhausting levels of physical violence.

During the shoot of all four seasons he suffered fractures and needed stitches on several occasions. But the physical pain helped him build a character who barely speaks. Starr prefers to use his body and silences rather than deliver unnecessary script monologues.

That series was his real survival school in the American industry.

But the real leap in scale came when Eric Kripke cast him as Homelander in The Boys. In 2019, the world discovered that Starr could embody the darkest side of the American Dream. His portrayal of a fascist superhero hungry for affection was unlike any comic-book villain seen to date.

He made audiences feel terror and pity at the same time.

The massive success of the series on Amazon Prime Video put him in a position of privilege he had never known before. So he began choosing projects more carefully so he wouldn't get trapped forever in the web of the blue and red suit.

The Alicante incident and the future

The intensity of his characters sometimes seems to spill abruptly into his private life. In March 2022, Starr was involved in a brawl at a pub in Alicante while filming The Covenant under the direction of Guy Ritchie. That night ended with a police arrest and a quick trial for assault.

The Spanish courts handed him a sentence of 12 months in prison, suspended in exchange for a payment of 5,000 euros in damages. The actor paid the amount right away and returned to the set to finish his scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal. The incident barely affected his career in the United States.

In 2023, he appeared in the horror film Cobweb, playing a family man with terrible secrets in the basement. Starr seems at ease in these roles, where apparent normalcy hides a latent psychopathy. It's a register he masters without ever needing to raise his voice.

His career now moves between major streaming productions and genre projects with tight budgets. In 2025 he is set to release G20, an action film in which he shares the cast with Viola Davis. The production contract stipulates that principal photography took place in Cape Town under strict safety measures.