The Boys’ Antony Starr on Homelander and [Spoiler]’s Bonus-Scene Reunion: ‘It’s Such a Conflicted Moment’

Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Boys Season 4 finale. Proceed at your own risk!

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As The Boys wrapped up Season 4, the Prime Video drama saved one last surprise for after the closing credits started to roll on the finale.

In a bonus scene, the Speaker of the House-turned-President Calhoun led Homelander into a secret bunker, where a still-alive Soldier Boy (played by Jensen Ackles) was being kept on ice, so to speak.

“You’ve got to be f–king kidding me. This whole time…” Homelander marveled, looking down at the body of his biological father, whom he thought was dead.

Ackles was first introduced as the original supe in early Season 3, which eventually revealed that Homelander is of Soldier Boy’s bloodline. But any hopes of a warm and fuzzy family reunion were dashed in the Season 3 finale, when Soldier Boy called Homelander weak and sniveling. He then struck Homelander’s son, Ryan, prompting The Seven’s leader to turn on his own father during a climactic fight scene. To stop Soldier Boy from blowing everyone to pieces, Maeve jumped out of the Vought tower window with Soldier Boy, who exploded in the sky. But the supe survived the blast and was secretly cryogenically preserved by Mallory.

At the time of that episode, showrunner Eric Kripke told TVLine, “He’s probably not going to show up in the short term. But there’s a very specific reason we didn’t kill him. The series is not going to end without Soldier Boy popping up again.”

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With the show now entering its fifth-and-final-season endgame, the timing of Soldier Boy’s reappearance makes perfect sense, and his relationship with Homelander is as fragile and complicated as ever in the brief finale glimpse. Homelander even seems to be on the verge of tears as he stares at an unconscious Soldier Boy. So what exactly is going through Homelander’s mind in that unexpected moment?

“I didn’t want to answer that question, because I don’t think the character knows,” his portrayer Antony Starr tells TVLine in the above video. “I think it’s such a loaded moment. You know those moments in life where you know something very intense is happening, but you can’t process things in the moment? We don’t work like that. I wanted that moment to be he knows what he’s coming in to see. He’s coming into the room, he knows what’s there. But then the reality of seeing his father, the father who wanted to kill him… It’s such a conflicted moment.”

“Personally, I didn’t want to take it further than, ‘Wow, what does that mean?'” Starr continues. “It is loaded. It’s very full, but as to what it means, I don’t know. I still don’t know. Antony doesn’t know what that meant for the character, because I don’t think the character should know.”

The Boys fans, how excited were you see to Ackles? Hit the comments!

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