Karl Urban on the weird, wild new season of The Boys, superhero orgies and the next Star Trek film

With a timely war theme and a superhero orgy, Kiwi actor Karl Urban reveals how the new season of The Boys “will push the envelope on every level”.

KARL Urban has a promise for fans of the hit superhero satire, The Boys – the new season is going to be “next-level, batshit-crazy good”.

“I think if I had to pick one word would be ‘wild’,” the star of the Lord of the Rings and Star Trek movies says over Zoom call from his New Zealand home.

“I feel like this season, we really push the envelope on every level. And the show is about to introduce a couple of other genres to the existing genres that are within The Boys world. So, I’m super excited for the audience to get their eyes on it.”

Wait, what? What other genres could possibly be added to an Emmy-nominated show that already straddles drama, action, black comedy, satire and superheroes?

“Well, I’d say musical and cartoon,” he says, a little cryptically declining to elaborate on the eagerly anticipated but closely guarded season three, which airs next month.

For two seasons, Urban has played the angry, volatile and violent Billy Butcher, the leader of a band of outlaws dedicated to bringing down the corrupt cabal of corporatised superheroes who killed his wife.

But this season, if the trailers are anything to go by, the man who despises superheroes – and particularly their most powerful and twisted figurehead Homelander – more than anything, acquires powers of his own. Butcher, says Urban, is on a “path of revenge as opposed to justice – and that is a slippery slope”.

Karl Urban as Butcher with compatriot Antony Starr as Homelander in a scene from Season 3 of The Boys.

“What’s going on this season … is the question of ‘how far are you willing to go in order to achieve what you want to achieve?’,” Urban says. “In Butcher’s case, it’s ‘are you willing to become the monster and in order to defeat the monster?’

“Every character in the show is faced with that moral dilemma and must choose a path and that path leads to unlikely alliances and fractures and relationships and, circling back to your opening question, some pretty batshit-crazy events.

“Butcher is volatile and he is dangerous. But he’s also wrestling with a morality around what he’s doing. He is fully aware that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And he’s under no illusions as to exactly who and what he is.”

Since first airing in 2019, The Boys, which is adapted from the comic book of the same name that run from 2006-20212, has had an uncanny knack for being in touch with the spirit of the times.

The first season arrived on the back of the MeToo movement and deep into the Trump presidency. It tapped into a wave of anger about sexual assault and harassment against women and viewers didn’t have to try too hard to connect the dots between the shameless popularism of the stars-and-stripes wearing Homelander and the then occupant of the White House.

The second season, which aired in September 2020, introduced a character called Stormfront, whose white supremacist, neo-Nazi rantings coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests reaching boiling point in the months after the murder of black man George Floyd by a white policeman in May of that year.

Jack Quaid, Karl Urban, Tomer Capon, Karen Fukuhara and Laz Fernando Alonso in the new season of The Boys.

The eagerly-anticipated third season, which was filmed last year in Canada, arrives next month with the world still transfixed by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and, according to Urban, is once again eerily and sadly prescient.

“Thematically, unfortunately, the theme of war is so tragically relevant,” he says. “This season is a little bit of a bit about picking sides and it’s heading to a massive conflict.”

But though The Boys might touch on serious, contemporary issues, Urban is at pains to emphasise that its primary function is to entertain in these troubled times.

“My biggest hope for this season is what it’s going to deliver is a respite from the some of the news that flashes across television sets most nights,” he says.

Urban confirms that the action and the graphic nature of the very adult show has definitely been ramped up for the new season, but says show runner Eric Kripke never goes out to shock just for the sake of making The Boys bigger and badder than anything that has come before. That said, this season will finally put on screen one of the comic book’s most infamous storylines, titled Herogasm, which focuses on an annual superhero orgy and is sure to be eye-opening to say the least.

“Well, it’s what you would expect – it’s a superhero orgy,” says Urban, wryly. “And in true Boys fashion, I think we do just as much justice to the male form as we do the female form. So, let’s just say there’s something in it for everybody.”

Karl Urban as the title character in Dredd, a movie he says was before its time.

With superhero movies, and particularly the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, being the most successful film genre of the last decade, it’s tempting to view darker, satirical, more-adult takes on the genre such as The Boys and The Umbrella Academy as some kind of reaction against that dominance. Urban is not so sure, pointing out the original The Boys comics predate the MCU by a couple of years, but agrees that his show gives superhero fans a fresh take.

“I think that part of its appeal is that it offers a unique perspective on a genre that we have come to have seen so much of and I think it’s kind of refreshing in that regard because our show dares to do and say the things that Marvel and DC and other properties can’t,” he says.

Urban had flirted with the comic book world well before The Boys, taking the title role in the big-screen adaptation of the revered comic book Judge Dredd. That dark, dystopian sci-fi action film tanked at the box office ten years ago but has since become a cult classic, leading Urban to believe that “it might have been a bit ahead of its time”.

“Had Deadpool been released the year before Dredd, which was an R rated superhero genre that was an absolute blockbuster, I believe that Dredd would have been treated differently by the US distributors and we might have had a different result at the box office. That being said, I couldn’t be more proud of that film.”

Karl Urban. pictured with Zachary Quinto, is waiting for the phone to ring about another Star Trek movie, but says he’s keen.

Rumours have abounded ever since about a possible revival for Dredd, either with further films or as a streaming series and Urban is certainly keen to see more of the world, regardless of whether he’s involved or not.

“I think it’s an underutilized IP and I can’t wait to see what they do with it,” he says. “I would just love to see more of it.”

Similarly he’s in dark about the status of a long-rumoured fourth Star Trek film, which would see him reprise his role of Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy, opposite Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto’s Spock and Simon Pegg’s Scotty.

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“I only know what has been written about in the press thus far,” he says. “Apparently they are working on another movie and at some point in the future they hope to make it and in the best case scenario, we will all be available to partake in it. We’d love to come back because we have so much fun making those movies. That cast is one of the best hangs and it’d be a lot of fun.”

The Boys season 3 streams on Prime Video from June 3.

Originally published as Karl Urban on the weird, wild new season of The Boys, superhero orgies and the next Star Trek film