With “Mortal Kombat II” and “The Boys,” Karl Urban has become the master of the nerd

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Despite his different accents and looks, Urban isn’t exactly a chameleon on screen — there’s something familiar and comforting when he appears. But he doesn’t want the public to know what else they’re getting.

“I think that’s dangerous territory, because you start pandering to your audience. And that then deprives you of the ability to discover new ground,” he says during a recent visit to Harvard. Hollywood ReporterLos Angeles offices.

His colleagues describe Urban as having a blue-collar spirit, more concerned with doing the job right than with the usual Hollywood status indicators, such as who is at the top of the list.

This is due to his upbringing as an only child in New Zealand, where his mother worked at a facility that rented film equipment to the country’s thriving film scene. A young Urban attended crew screenings, with local films being shown in the garage of his mother’s workplace. “The way they were interacting with each other and laughing and drinking beer and smoking. I just thought, ‘Oh, this is a family,'” Urban recalls. “I want to be a part of this.”

He grew up watching Star Trek With his father, an immigrant from Germany, writing and directing children’s productions, he and his bandmates would take on seniors’ homes around town.

He got his break producing Sam Raimi Xena: Warrior Princess 1996, which was filmed in New Zealand. This brought him to Los Angeles to pursue work in the United States. He was driving around town with a large map folded up on the dashboard. “Nine times out of 10 I was impossibly late,” he says of the pre-GPS era.

A few years later, he got a lead role in a small New Zealand film Milk pricedirected by Harry Sinclair, who showed a rough cut to his friend Peter Jackson as he looked to cast Éomer in it. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Playing the leader of the Riders of Rohan would be a big break for Urban, but it was easy for the young actor to feel impostor syndrome around greats like McKellen and Christopher Lee. That changed when he filmed a scene in which knights surround Aragon, Legolas, and Gimli.

“We were in two locations opposite each other, and Peter invited us to his screen. The first thing he said was, ‘We’re close to greatness here.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good sign,’” Urban recalls.

Lord of the Rings With Urban’s second outing, it became a cultural touchstone. return of the king, It won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. Action film credits have remained steady thereafter, with a host of features for Universal, including Lord Bourne.

2009 Star Trek It was a turning point, as the serious actor with the face of A Lord of the Rings The hero had great comedic chops. But it didn’t start smoothly.

“It was a disaster, a train wreck,” Urban says, laughing about his first meeting with director JJ Abrams.

It started off well enough, as they spent some time joking about mutual friend Dom Monaghan, who appeared in both Lord of the Rings And Abrams lost. “I think JJ just killed it, so I congratulated them on that,” Urban says.

Then things turned south when Abrams, famously secretive, asked if Urban had any questions.

“I’m like, ‘Yes!’ “Really excited. What’s the story? And he said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ And she looked blank and a little confused and I said, ‘Oh, okay.'” “I guess I don’t have any questions after that,” Urban recalls. “And he stared at me and said, ‘Oh, okay, thanks.’ And she walked out of there and said, ‘I’ll never hear from that guy again.'”

A few weeks later, Urban received a phone call saying that Abrams wanted him to audition for McCoy. “I didn’t even hear that laughter in the middle of filming,” Urban says. “I’m having a really hard time remembering the dialogue, and there’s this damned laughter that happens. And then also in a moment I think: ‘Oh, he’s laughing at me.’ He loves what I do.”

In an extremely rare occurrence in a Hollywood casting, Abrams was heard telling his cast mates, “This is Bones.” He got a call on the drive home that it was his turn. He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Abrams, who allowed him to insert a piece of the Bones canon into the film. “I suggested to him that when he talked about his ex-wife, he mention that all he had left in the divorce were his bones,” Urban recalls. Abrams said to try it out and put it in the movie.

The film was a huge success, revitalizing the franchise for a new era, with two sequels. Urban heard from the wife of Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock character who also appeared in the 2009 film, that Nimoy cried watching Urban, because it reminded him of the late DeForest Kelly, the original Bones character.

Despite being a genre icon, Urban wasn’t obsessed with comic books growing up. The only book he devoured? 2000 ADa British science fiction comedy film featuring Judge Dredd. It was actually made into Sylvester Stallone’s 1995 bomb, and was reinvented in the early 2010s.

Dread Screenwriter Alex Garland caught up with Urban about starring in the regeneration.

“Sometimes, when you meet an actor, on some level they want the role, so they’ll tell you what they might imagine you want to hear,” Garland says. Not so with Orban. “What he did was basically say, ‘I won’t be able to do this unless certain rules are adhered to.’”

Urban rules? Dredd never takes the helmet off. He never smiles. He has no love interest. Fortunately, these were all things the production was already planning anyway.

Garland, who is not a fan of table reading, still remembers this book. “Dredd just walked into the room,” he says of Urban. “His voice changed. He also got a sense of humor into the character, which perhaps no other actor would have captured. I remember sitting in my chair thinking: ‘Oh, damn, this is going to work.’

“It was a difficult shoot,” says Urban, who dealt with a director being sidelined by producers, as well as costume restrictions. He leaned heavily on Garland for guidance.

“It was a challenge for me in terms of being completely incognito,” he says And depriving the audience of seeing me, which is one of the most effective tools an actor has.”

The film was not successful at the box office. Unfortunately for Dreadarrived just months after the Indonesian classic Raidwhich had a similar visualization of law enforcement forces fighting the floors of a large building. Orbán is quick to note this Dread It was filmed first, and made a lot of money through video on demand. “If this movie were made today, I think it would be a different story. I think the scene would be more adaptable to it,” Urban says.

Enter a project for which the world was very amenable: Boys.

Urban always felt a friendly rivalry with Antony Starr, a fellow Kiwi actor with whom he often competed for roles. The two first met at a barbecue and once attended a Meisner acting course together at home.

In 2018, Urban was sitting at a traffic light when he discovered a news article on his phone: Starr had been cast in the film. Boys. He read the synopsis and was intrigued. A few weeks later, his agent called out of the blue to say he had an offer to play Butcher, Starr’s Homelander’s main rival.

It’s Peeling that has provided many delicious scenes, but one stands out for Starr.

“The scene where Homelander is at Butcher’s house. He feels like no one understands him, and maybe the only person who might understand him…is the Butcher,” Starr wrote in an email. “It’s really unexpected, and shows that despite all that they’re actually more alike than either of them might want to admit. The scene was so much fun and Carl just crushed it.” (Starr also shouts out Urban for being good at backgammon: “Some might say that’s his true passion.”)

While researching Butcher, creator Eric Kripke already knew that Urban could handle action and humor. But he had one question that needed answering.

“Is he going to break your heart? I also needed him to be the kind of emotional character that, despite doing horrible things, you could really get behind it and you could have your heart broken by it,” Kripke says. “And for me, he crushed it. My expectations were high, and he exceeded them.”

Boys It was an instant hit for Amazon, with President Barack Obama calling it one of his favorite shows. Kripke was praised for seemingly predicting the future, with the show lining up real-life events — including the final season’s arrival with ICE raids on America, with Homelander ordering similar raids.

But Urban, who is cautious about his personal life, extends that thinking to his work as well.

“I often think that the more the audience knows about me, the harder it is for them to leave the door baggage and accept the character I’m playing,” Urban says of maintaining his privacy. “I believe in not over-explaining the work. I think that as soon as you say, ‘Oh, this character is Donald Trump or this character is Marjorie Taylor Greene,’ then, first of all, you’ve lost a third of your audience. And secondly, you’ve actually diminished the quality of the art, because you’re depriving the audience of the ability to process it and interpret it as they see fit.”

like Boys I started to calm down, Mortal Kombat II It became an unexpected turn for Orbán. Usually after a season BoysHe returns home to New Zealand to spend time with family and recover from a busy schedule. But Butcher spent most of Season 4 confined to a hospital bed, and as the season came to a close, Urban was anything but exhausted.

“I contacted my agent and said, ‘Listen, I’m ready to go right away,'” he recalls. What do you have? I would like to do something heavy at work. “I have gas in the tank.”

At that very moment, Mortal Kombat The Brain Trust was looking for Johnny Cage, the fan-favorite character teased at the end of the previous film, which was a huge hit on HBO Max, but left some things to be desired by fans.

“There was literally a call coming in, and we were like, ‘What? No way, but yeah!” recalls producer Todd Garner, who had never worked with Urban but he was huge Boys A fan, he will continue to enjoy many golf games during his downtime in Australia with Urban. “It was by accident.”

Urban trained in action and martial arts for over three months to play the cage role, and added some of his own lines. One of the quips about Cage being the Saturn winner was Urban’s line, as well as things like “That’s Hollywood 101, baby.” For research purposes, Urban spent time observing families at youth martial arts tournaments in New Zealand, and saw how parents and children deal with disappointment and triumph.

“This was the toughest physical challenge I’ve ever faced in my career,” he says of training.

The film is expected to make $50 million this weekend at the box office Boys It concludes on May 20. Both are rare urban projects that his two 20-year-old sons from a previous marriage will see. He tried to show them Lord of the Rings Once, to utter indifference.

He takes his son’s lack of interest in his work so seriously that he once turned down a role in it. “It was one of my son’s favorite shows and I was offered a role in it and I didn’t want to ruin it,” he says, declining to name the show out of respect for the actor who took the job and who “smashed it.”

But his children love it Boyssomething he’s proud of, and they played a lot of games in 2015 Mortal Kombat X Together, indicating that they would agree to this Mortal Kombat II also.

For the first time in eight years of work Boys show, Urban has a clear future schedule.

“I feel good about leaving it in a good place,” says Urban. “You rarely have the opportunity to land the ship on your own terms, before it is taken from you.” Boys ending. “I’m not an actor who will sit comfortably in a show for 10 or 15 years. I’ll get bored. What matters to me is the challenge of doing something I’ve never done before.”

—James Hibberd contributed to this story.