Featured Image Credit: Prime Video
Topics: The Boys, Stranger Things, Film and TV
Thomas Bamford
With The Boys racing towards its own series finale on Prime Video, Anthony Starr, who plays unhinged anti-hero Homelander, was in a reflective mood.
After eight years of lasered planes, rooftop parenting and some of the genuinely most unhinged television ever made, the pressure to stick the landing is real, and Starr knows better than most how badly these things can go wrong.
Because he's been watching - very closely.
The Stranger Things finale landed on New Year's Day after seemingly endless hype, promising to finally close the book on Eleven, Venca and the Upside Down for good.
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For millions of fans, it was end of an era.
For others, it was a deeply unsatisfying conclusion, one that pulled back from its most emotional moments, including an epilogue that revealed Eleven had survived her apparent sacrifice and was living in Iceland.
The backlash got so bad that fans started convincing themselves a secret ninth episode was being hidden from them, a conspiracy theory that became known as Conformity Gate.
Alas, it never showed up. That really was the ending.
Starr has hinted he was among those left scratching his head, although he was diplomatic enough to not point the finger directly. Asked recently whether any show had ever managed to give fans a truly satisfying conclusion, he paused before revealing he'd been mulling over a very specific example.
Speaking to Wired, he said: “Something just finished, I won’t say what, and nobody died.
"I was just scratching my head going ‘there’s nowhere else to go this is the end of the run, kill some people!'"
The internet has naturally filled in the blanks.
The slightly awkward wrinkle in all of this is that The Boys has been facing some eerily similar criticism of its own this season, with fans grumbling that the final run has felt surprisingly low stakes so far.
That being said, he is clearly aware that satisfying an entire fanbase with a finale is basically impossible, but hat hasn't stopped him from having strong opinions about other people's attempts.
What he was considerably more bullish about was how The Boys itself plans to go out. When pressed on what fans should expect, his answer was short and unambiguous: "Nothing is going to be left to the imagination."
The Boys Season 5 is currently streaming on Prime Video. The season finale will take place on May 20th.