Anthony Starr will shortly return as the vile superhero Homelander in The Boys, which is about to air its fifth and final season. But some fans have looked at his blonde hair, square jaw, and gift for portraying detestable human beings and concluded that he’s the perfect guy to play as iconic video game villain: Albert Wesker from the Resident Evil series, a virologist and double agent who has been helping fill the world with zombies since the very first Resident Evil game released on the original PlayStation in 1996.
That said, it sounds like the desire may only go one way. As Starr revealed in an interview with ComicBook, while he’s been told he’d be a great fit as Wesker, he doesn’t necessarily agree. “I don’t even know what it is, man,” he said. “I’m an actor from New Zealand and if people ask you about a job, you go, ‘Yeah!’ because there are not many jobs in New Zealand…So I’m trained into thinking, ‘Someone said ‘you wanna [do it]…?’ Yeah, I want that! What is it?”
People keep bringing this up, and I think the only thing I have in common is blonde hair, which I’ve gotten rid of. I think you’ll probably need someone younger. I’m 50.
Albert Wesker was canonically born in 1960, which makes him around 50 years old at the time of, say, Resident Evil 5, which came out in 2009 and in which Wesker plays a big role. The Resident Evil mythology has never been airtight, so if the producers behind the next Resident Evil movie wanted Antony Starr to play Wesker, and if he was interested, they could probably find a way to make it work.
A Brief History of Albert Wesker in the ‘Resident Evil’ Movies
In the video games, Wesker is an operative of the evil Umbrella Corporation, which apparently thinks the quickest way to profitability is to bring about a zombie apocalypse. He often manipulates things from behind the scenes and can be identified by his blonde hair, fondness for sunglasses, and callousness towards human life.
Wesker has appeared in Resident Evil movies before, but it’s never quite the Wesker fans know from the games. In 2007’s Resident Evil: Extinction, he’s played by Jason O’Mara and depicted as the head of Umbrella, not an operative. That version of Wesker returns in 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife, now played by Shawn Roberts. Tom Hopper’s version of the character from 2022’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (above) sticks the closest to the games, although he’s still not quite the merciless schemer fans know, and his signature blonde hair and sunglasses are mostly missing. Finally, Wesker was played by Lance Reddick in the short-lived Netflix Resident Evil show, where he’d created several clones of himself to carry out different tasks.
There’s another Resident Evil movie on the way, this time from Weapons director Zach Cregger. That’s exciting, because Cregger has proven himself a fantastic horror director and professes to love the Resident Evil video games, but we don’t know if Wesker will show up. The movie will reportedly revolve around original characters like Bryan (Austin Abrams) and Carl (Paul Walter Hauser), so it doesn’t sound like it’ll be a one-to-one adaptation of the games, although hopefully it captures their spirit.
We’ll see what Cregger and crew are cooking up when his Resident Evil reboot comes out on September 18, 2026. In the meanwhile, you can see Antony Starr channel a bit of Wesker in The Boys when season 5 premieres on Prime Video on April 8.
- Release Date
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September 18, 2026
- Producers
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Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, Miri Yoon, Robert Kulzer, Roy Lee
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
