Amazon Officially Casts The Boys Actor In A Strangely Similar Role

©Amazon / Courtesy Everett Collection Published Jul 21, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Sign in to your ScreenRant account The Boys recently ended with a whimper, not a bang, and the cast are already lining up their next projects. Whereas The Boys’ writing took a nosedive in the last couple of seasons, the actors were always great — especially Antony Starr and Karl Urban in the lead roles as Homelander and Billy Butcher — so their careers will easily survive the critical hit The Boys took in its fifth and final season. Urban is starring in the live-action/animated hybrid I, Object; Starr will play Andy Warhol in the biopic Samo Lives; and Jack Quaid is set to star in the comedy Close Personal Friends. Erin Moriarty is in True Haunting, Chace Crawford is in Super Troopers 3, and Laz Alonso will appear alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Kellys. P. J. Byrne is one of the most prolific character actors in Hollywood; you can see him in Rampage with Dwayne Johnson, The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, and somewhere in the sprawling ensemble of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. To The Boys fans, Byrne is best known as Adam Bourke, the hacky journeyman director who helms a lot of Vought Studios’ supe propaganda. Adam was a great parody of egotistical Hollywood filmmakers who abuse their position of power and think they’re God’s gift to cinema despite producing nothing but mediocre content, and Byrne played that role perfectly (he might’ve been directed by a couple of these unbearable divas throughout his storied career). Byrne’s next role is surprisingly similar to Adam. In I Play Rocky, Amazon’s upcoming dramatization of the making of Rocky, Byrne will play Irwin Winkler, the producer who plucked Sylvester Stallone from obscurity and turned his brilliant little boxing script into an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Winkler had a lot more artistic integrity than the VCU’s go-to director-for-hire. So Many "Predictions" From The Boys Have Weirdly Come True A few years ago, The Boys cast P. J. Byrne as a Hollywood power player, and now, he’s playing real-life Hollywood power player Irwin Winkler. This is like if Antony Starr followed up his role as Homelander by playing Superman; it feels like a meta nod to his character from The Boys. This isn’t the first “prediction” that The Boys has made that came true. Eric Kripke and the writers of The Boys never set out to predict the future, but the real world has gotten so absurd over the past decade that whatever absurdity Kripke and co. came up with, real life would come along to top it. In The Boys, Homelander had a vision in which he was told he was the son of God, and the second coming of Jesus, and he just instantly believed it and started trying to convince the world it was true. Then, in real life, President Donald Trump released an A.I.-generated image depicting himself as the literal messiah, Jesus Christ, healing the sick. In The Boys, Vought started pulling broadcast licenses as a fascistic measure to control the narrative and prevent negative stories about Homelander from seeing the light of day. Then, in real life, the FCC threatened ABC’s broadcasting license over Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes about Trump. This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to The Boys; all satirists are having a hard time making satire out of real-world politicians that are a satire unto themselves. It’s getting tougher and tougher for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to make new South Park episodes, because real life is starting to feel like one long South Park episode. The Boys’ focus on Trump ended up hurting the show, because the Homelander was a much more interesting character before they made him a 1:1 avatar of the Donald. The Boys 7/10 Release Date 2019 - 2026-00-00 Showrunner Eric Kripke