When you're working for so long with a group of people and you become like a family, it elevates the experience above and beyond what you would normally experience when you're only working with a group for a relatively short amount of time.ĭid it help with Lord of The Rings that you didn't need to travel relatively as far from home? I think for me the best experiences I've had would definitely be Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and The Boys. To me, what defines a great experience, is the company as the people that I'm working with, and I've been very, very blessed. Do you have a favorite genre that you've been a part of, or a favorite specific franchise? You've been in a lot of big genre franchises, like Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and the MCU. The Boys is certainly representative of that.ĭo you see superheroes sticking around as the dominant cultural force for much longer? Or do you think that there's going to be a turn at some point? Audiences are a lot more switched onto the industrial-military complex that it's actually working at a level far higher than the highest office in the land. That definitely resonates today, as it has historically. What we come to understand more of in season two is the actual true power behind the superheroes, in terms of the corporation. It's not just as simple as heroes and villains. The great thing about the writing of The Boys is that there is a lot of gray area when it comes to the characters. What was playing in that theme like for you, and do you think it resonated especially well in 2019? One thing I noticed about the “villain” of The Boys is that the bad guy was, really, the corporation behind the superheroes themselves and, to a certain extent, capitalism. I didn't think of it, I didn't write it, but I'm definitely guilty of doing it. And I pray that I personally don't get the karma payback for what he does. Looking at season two, some of the shit that Butcher gets up to is truly diabolical. Butcher has both the tendency to be the villain and the hero, which makes him a hell of a lot of fun to play. There is a war inside of Butcher, and to get to the dawn, you must first travel through the night. Well, Butcher is a fun character to play, because of the degree of internal conflict that wages within him. What was it like to play Billy Butcher? He feels like a very specific type of character for our time, both in terms of his fairly righteous anger and his possibly too far extreme ways of reacting to it. Once I've finished working on a piece, then it's not mine anymore. For me, you know, the destination is not what's important. From my perspective, it was another opportunity to collaborate with excellent partners. Obviously tonally the material is extremely different. Well, here's the thing: On the ground, the experience was fundamentally the same. Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the Chris Pine-led Star Trek films). He’s also racked up scene-stealing roles in big fantasy franchises ( Lord of the Rings) and sci-fi tales alike (he played Dr. In 2018, he played the gun-toting Asgardian Skurge in Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, and he played the hyper-serious super-cop Judge Dredd in 2012’s Dredd.

The Boys isn’t the first time that the 47-year-old actor has been at odds with a costumed superhero. “We just wrapped last week, and truly, the day after I left, it snowed,” Urban tells GQ over the phone in late November, enjoying the Southern Hemisphere’s spring weather. But Urban is also happy because wrapping season two meant he got to leave Toronto, where the series is filmed, and head back to his home in New Zealand before the weather got bad. He’s happy because the show’s first season was a massive success for the streaming service, and because it became one of the most talked-about freshman series of the year. He’s happy because he’s very excited about how the sophomore season shaped up. Karl Urban is very happy that he’s finished filming the second season of The Boys, Amazon’s darkly funny, anti-corporate take on superheroes.

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