Original-Cin Q&A: Karl Urban on Hunting Animated Sea Beasts and Being Covered in Blood on The Boys
Veteran New Zealand actor Karl Urban has been busy.
Season 3 of his hit TV series, The Boys ( shot on location in Toronto and the surrounding area) recently dropped on Prime Video. And his new animated feature The Sea Beast is about to start streaming on Netflix. (Meanwhile, a return to the role of Dr. McCoy in the rebooted Star Trek films is rumoured).
In the animated family-friendly film, Karl plays Sea Beast hunter Jacob Holland, whose life is turned upside down when a young girl stows away on his ship.
Capt. Holland (voiced by Karl Urban) rows alongside the crew in pursuit of the title Sea Beast
Our Bonnie Laufer caught up with Karl Urban via ZOOM to talk about his adventures at high sea behind a microphone.
CLICK HERE for Bonnie’s interview with Director Chris Williams and Karl's adorable co-star Zaris-Angel Hator.
The Sea Beast begins streaming on Netflix July 8th .
ORIGINAL-CIN: Karl greetings from Toronto, a city you know very, very well.
KARL URBAN: I do! Toronto is my home away from home. I was there for eight months shooting the latest season of The Boys under strict COVID rules! I know the city well!
ORIGINAL-CIN:. I loved your voice-over performance in The Sea Beast. Your Sea Beast hunter, Jacob Holland is very rugged, very handsome, a guy with a heart of gold. Was it like looking in the mirror?
URBAN: (Laughs) No, not at all. This character is way bigger than me and he's way blonder than me. Plus, he's really clumsy which I'm not. (Laughs). But I have to tell you I had a lot of fun playing him, that's for sure and I'm super excited and happy with how this movie has turned out.
ORIGINAL-CIN: Aside from the high sea adventures, the film really does focus on family, and who, at the end of the day, is your family. He's got his family out at sea but then he meets up with this young adorable, spunky girl who kind of shows him the way. Tell me a little bit about how being a dad yourself might have played into your performance.
URBAN: That’s an interesting question because I don't know if I actually drew that much experience from my personal life as a father into the movie because, really, the relationships are quite different.
I guess what I really enjoyed in the script was the sort of cantankerous bickering between these two characters who are both orphans. Obviously there is something about the paternal nature from Jacob towards Maisie. He is trying to protect her and look after her.
But I think the thing that I found most endearing about it was how this precocious young girl manages to sort of engineer a paradigm shift in Jacob, how she leads him to the knowledge that everything that he thinks about the world is actually not necessarily true. I thought that was key. There’s a line in the movie, “Even a hero can be wrong,” and that is absolutely true. I think it is a really important moral compass to absorb.
ORIGINAL-CIN: I was wondering when you see a beautiful film like this completed and you hear your voice coming out of this character, does it still freak you out after all these years doing what you do for a living?
URBAN: Yeah, most definitely! It's always a leap of faith when you're working on an animated movie. You have no idea, really what it's going to look like. You don't know what the other characters are going to sound like and you go in there and give the director the luxury of choice by doing your lines a multitude of different ways.
So you're always sort of blown away by the end product. This movie is so extraordinary, and I was so floored by the finished film. I've never ever seen an animated movie that is so textually rich the way the light plays off the water. Beyond that and the technical achievements of the film, it just has a great heart to it and I know that it'll be a hit with kids and families and even parents.
ORIGINAL-CIN: Before we wrap, as you said earlier Toronto is your home away from home because you have spent the better part of the last three years shooting your hit series, The Boys here. This season we discover that your character (Billy Butcher, who leads the fight against rogue super heroes) has some super powers. But I have to ask. Do you ever get sick of being covered in blood?
URBAN: (Laughs) Yeah, it's getting pretty old!! I thankfully didn't have it too badly this last season, but the season before I did.
There were weeks and weeks of being covered in blood, especially when we ran that speedboat through a whale. So yeah, but there are other characters like Jack Quaid's character, he gets it pretty bad.