The star of Amazon’s cult comic book series on failing in Australia, his roles in The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek and spending half his life away from home
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.”
