‘The Boys’: The Real Cow Antony Starr Milked “Wasn’t Thoroughly Impressed”

This July 4th, what’s more American than watching a man dressed in the red, white, and blue drinking a nice bucket of milk? How about if that milk comes straight for the source: a live cow, that actor Antony Starr milked — for real — for this week’s episode of The Boys?

“This was fun,” Starr told Decider on the scene. “It was like, Homelander goes to the source, right? I mean, I think the thing used to be breast milk. Now, we’re just anything. He’s not fussy anymore.”

Starr is calling out that at least once per season, his villainous Supe, Homelander, tends to have some sort uncomfortable scene involving milk, or the simulation thereof. In Season 1, the insecure Superman stand-in was comforted by his boss/maternal figure/lover Madelyn Stilwell (Elisabeth Shue) by laying in her lap, positioning his head like he was breast-feeding on the new mother, and sucking on her fingers. In Season 2, Homelander took it up a notch when he went to a stash of the now deceased Stilwell’s breast milk, heated it up, and licked the milk provocatively, directly from the baby bottle.

While we’re pretty sure the cow that gets milked this episode has nothing to do with Stilwell or Shue, it’s clear that dairy has become Homelander’s go-to comfort food. In this week’s “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed”, after a disastrous speech at a Presidential rally, Homelander wanders backstage to a farm where he sees the waiting bovine. Entranced, Homelander wanders up, milks the cow into a bucket, and starts slurping down the milk until he’s interrupted by Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit).

And while this is almost a religious experience for the character, for Starr it was mostly about working his brain around milking a cow who could have cared less.

“It was very weird, very intimate,” Starr continued. “Never milked a cow before, and it’s a very strange feeling. It was quite surreal, actually. The poor old cow had been there all day by the time we got to shooting, and she was restless and just pretty fed up with life. And then there’s some idiot in a cape down there pulling on her teats. So she wasn’t thoroughly impressed, and stumbled around a bit. And so I was a little bit… I didn’t want to get trodden on.”

The bored cow doesn’t come through in the scene, which ends with Homelander hilarious stammering and trying to explain what he’s doing to Neuman. But as Starr revealed, the even funnier footage comes from the outtakes.

“Probably the most comical thing about that scene would be watching the real life footage of me trying to actually achieve it, the goal of getting any milk out of the teat,” Starr said.

Release the raw cow footage, Amazon! It’s what the fans want. And America.

The Boys Season 3 finale premieres next Friday, July 8, on Prime Video.