Amazon’s superhero show The Boys isn’t exactly known for its good taste. Episodes come packed to the gills with fake blood, sex scenes and exploding skulls. This is all part of its charm – a corrective, perhaps, to Marvel’s bloodless, cartoonish depictions of violence – but it means it isn’t necessarily something you would watch on a crowded train.
Nonetheless, that is how I watched the first episode of the third season. I realised my error during what is surely the most outrageous moment the show has attempted. I am forbidden from sharing the specifics, but it features a part of the human body manipulated in a way I could not have imagined, shot in a way I have never seen before.
The sequence is fresh in my mind when I arrive in central London to meet the star of The Boys, Karl Urban. Still jetlagged from his flight from New Zealand four days earlier, and already several hours into a punishing day of interviews, he is polite and attentive, but obviously attempting to conserve energy. Long-form interviews with him are thin on the ground; at least one video exists of him giving a weary death stare to an overfamiliar interviewer. But as we pull up chairs to sit down, there is only one place to start: have you seen the scene with the [redacted body part]?
“I’ve only seen some rough stuff, so I haven’t seen its, um, full glory,” he says. “But there are things about season three that, once you’ve seen them, you will never unsee them.”
The show is based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic book series about a team of superheroes who are run as a wing of a large media corporation, complete with spin-off movies and pop careers, and the band of guerrillas determined to expose their reckless behaviour and hypocrisy. In a world where superheroes have become the dominant cultural force, The Boys feels like an important continuation of the conversation.
The show was a hit over lockdown – it is now probably Amazon’s flagship series – and public hunger for new episodes has been palpable for some time. Season three seems to have recognised this: the jokes hit harder, the effects are more gruesome, the celebrity cameos are bigger. This season takes on one of the books’ most notorious chapters – a long, graphic superhero orgy known as Herogasm. How on earth do you adapt that for TV?
“It’s difficult to talk about it without giving away too many spoilers, but I’ll tell you one thing,” he says, leaning forward. “Jensen [Ackles, who plays Soldier Boy, a hero in the style of Captain America] walked on set one day when they were shooting Herogasm. He turned to one of the cameramen and said: ‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ The cameraman has this thousand-yard stare and goes: ‘Dude, I’ve seen some shit.’”
Although The Boys is an ensemble show, with a sprawling collection of superheroes and antihero vigilantes, Urban has emerged as the show’s lead. His character, a violent everyman turned vigilante called Billy Butcher, dominates the show’s posters; his ferocious quest for vengeance drives forward the plot.
This season, Butcher will get superpowers. Was it fun to finally get to be a superhero? “I had a lot of discussions about what having powers might be like,” he says. “And I was like: ‘Well, it’s gonna hurt, right?’ It comes back to the question: what is the cost of power? The cost is that it actually causes an extreme amount of pain.”
This pain is not just physical. This season will show him struggling to cope with a version of parenthood that does not suit him. “It’s a responsibility that Butcher never anticipated, and it’s at loggerheads with his objective,” Urban says. “You can’t be a parent and a superhero-fighting vigilante.”
I wonder how much Urban can relate to Butcher’s competing priorities. The Boys shoots for half the year in Toronto, while his home and family – he has two sons with his ex-wife – are eight and a half thousand miles away in New Zealand. “I’m always on the clock,” he says, sighing. “When I’m in New Zealand, I know that, in six weeks or two months, I’m on a plane and I’m away for potentially six months. The most important thing for me when I get home is to connect with the people that are important to me.”
In previous years, Urban was able to flit backwards and forwards during breaks in filming. But season three was made during Covid, so he was shut away from his family for longer than ever. “I feel incredibly blessed and grateful for this amazing career and all the opportunity that comes with it,” he says. “But there is a sacrifice. I have missed countless birthdays of my boys; funerals of friends. And season three was the first time in my career that I had seven months away from my family. That was hard. I’ve never constructed my career to put myself in a position where I would be absent. So, yeah, that was difficult.”
Urban turns 50 next week and his children are 21 and 16. I am fascinated by the way that a parent-child relationship changes when the child reaches adulthood. How is it going?
“What’s the old saying? The bigger the kids, the bigger the problems,” he says, laughing. “My kids are great, they really are. But it’s just more complex. When they’re children, the issues are a lot more simple. As they find their way into adulthood and have to find their own way in life, that’s a huge challenge. Everybody, ultimately, has to make that journey for themselves and stand on their own two feet. At some point, the umbilical cord gets cut. I hope that I just have as much time as possible with them.”
When Urban was a boy, his mother worked for a company that rented lights and cameras to the New Zealand film industry. This was how he realised what he loved most about film. It wasn’t necessarily the finished work, but the camaraderie of the people who made it.
“Every so often, when a major New Zealand feature film was completed, they would screen it for the cast and the crew on the back of the garage door,” he says. “I was hanging with the crew, sitting on boxes and drinking beer and watching these movies like family. I just felt like it would be good to be a part of a family like this.”
A few years later, Urban dropped out of college to pursue acting. He started to gain traction, appearing in plays and local commercials, before making the leap to the bigger stage of Australia. Almost immediately, he realised he had made a mistake.
“It was brutal,” he says, starting from scratch in a new country. “I was very adamant that I wanted to work internationally, to work with the best calibre of film-maker that I could, but it was probably one of the toughest years of my life. I was actually questioning if I really wanted to do this.”
He was saved when an offer came in from back home. “I’m a firm believer in the philosophy ‘An opportunity neglected does not often return’,” he smiles. “So I went back to New Zealand and did a bunch of New Zealand films. One of them was a little film called The Price of Milk, which was directed by Harry Sinclair. Harry was a good friend of Peter Jackson, so he took a rough cut down to show Peter. And I just happened to be in Peter’s face when he was looking for someone to cast as Éomer in The Lord of the Rings.”
This is the role he credits with changing his life. Thanks to The Lord of the Rings, work in the US came far more easily than it did in Australia. In the past decade and a half, he has taken on a host of fan favourites, from comic book adaptations such as Priest and Dredd to Star Trek and Thor: Ragnarok. Does he have a secret formula when it comes to picking roles?
“No, I have no idea,” he says. “I’m definitely a fan of science fiction. But more than that I’m a fan of storytelling. It just so happens that we live in a world where the entertainment industry has become quite oriented around genre-based product. If I was an actor in the 70s, it would be a different story. In the 60s or 50s, I would have been in westerns. Genre is not a motivation to do or not do.”
Because fans love his work so much, I try to spend the last few minutes of our chat checking up on dormant projects. This is the closest I get to provoking Urban’s death stare. I will probably get shut down if I ask about Star Trek 4, won’t I?
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he growls, already starting to tune out. No word on the sequel, then? “Listen, I know it’s in development,” he says, for probably the millionth time this week. “They have a director attached. They are writing scripts and I know that the cast are all willing and ready to get back and do another one.”
Are you going to be part of the planned Judge Dredd TV show? He perks up a little. “Regardless of whether or not I’m involved with it, I think it’s such a wonderful property. John Wagner and his entire staff of writers and illustrators have created so many wonderful stories that I, personally, as a fan of Dredd, would love to see. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.”
Finally, I tell him, I have been searching his name on Reddit. “What’s that?” I tell him it is a place where, if you search for Karl Urban, you will find hundreds of pictures of his face cropped on to Wolverine’s body. And with that, for the first time in our interview, he starts barking with laughter.
“Oh really?” he splutters. “It’s flattering, but you have to rationally think about it. I’m what, two years younger than Hugh Jackman? [It is closer to four years.] I mean, if I was a studio looking to cast someone as Wolverine, I’d pick someone I’ll get three films out of. You’re not going to get three films out of Karl Urban unless you want a 65-year-old Wolverine.”
One theme that runs throughout Urban’s work is tight-knit ensembles. Between The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and The Boys, he picks films in which it seems like the cast have a blast together.
“Well, it comes back to family, doesn’t it?” he says, finally loosened up. “It comes back to that environment I identified when I was eight years old. To me, that’s the most important thing in life: building a solid connection with people and having a great time doing the thing that you really love.”
The first three episodes of season three of The Boys premiere on Prime Video on 3 June
