‘Pig’s a---’: How Josh Lawson took Aussie swearing to next level playing Kano in Mortal Kombat

Aussie actor Josh Lawson reveals what the Hollywood studio bosses thought of his swearing in the Adelaide-filmed Mortal Kombat.

Josh Lawson’s character Kano in the new big-budget adaptation of cult video game Mortal Kombat was always going to come from Down Under, but no one involved had any idea of just how Aussie he would become.

Ever since British actor Trevor Goddard played Kano with a (somewhat mystifying) Australian accent for the first film version of the two-player fighting game in 1995, the shady, rough-as-guts mercenary with a laser beam eye has been embraced as one of our own by the legions of fans around the world and in all subsequent iterations of the character across all media. But although this new version was shot in Adelaide with Perth director Simon McQuoid in charge, the script was written by American Greg Russo, meaning the local flavour was somewhat lacking.

“There weren’t that many Aussie things in the script,” recalls Lawson, over the phone during a quick break in the Bryon Bay hinterland before tonight’s red carpet premiere in Sydney. “and I was like ‘look, we can really amp this up, we can take his Aussieness all the way up to 11, I promise’. It was a lot of fun to inject a bit of that.”

Australian actor Josh Lawson as Kano in a scene from the bloody Mortal Kombat.

Some of his swearier suggestions – egged on by the local crew – that made it to the final cut of the effects-heavy action blockbuster about a disparate group of fighters facing off in, well, mortal combat, included “pig’s arse”, “no sweat off my sack” and a spectacularly well timed and delivered “you f---ing beauty”. And it seems that the more outrageous his outbursts got, the more the powers that be at the American studio loved them.

“Simon told me that when they played it for New Line and Warner Brothers, there were a couple of Kano lines where they went ‘oh my God, that’s my favourite line in the film – and I don’t even know what he’s saying’,” Lawson says with a laugh. “So, apparently I did go too far – but they didn’t seem to mind.”

As a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Lawson has deep roots with Mortal Kombat, which first appeared in 1992 as an arcade game and evolved into one of the most enduring and successful video games ever made. The Brisbane-born actor, who turns 40 in July, used to feed the machines at his local roller-skating rink (“this makes me sound like a I am 60 years old”) in the suburb of Stafford, but admits he usually plumped for “good all-round fighter” Liu Kang rather than Kano. He moved on from video games as he got older and embraced acting finding TV success in Australia on comedies including Thank God You’re Here and Chandon Pictures, prompting to chance his arm overseas.

Josh Lawson is glad to be back in Australia after more than a decade in Los Angeles. Picture, John Gass

Like so many Aussies before him, he faced knock-back after knock-back in Los Angeles, before landing a leading role opposite Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell in the sit-com House Of Lies, which for five seasons from 2012, as well as appearing in movies including The Campaign and Anchorman 2: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, both with comedy superstar Will Ferrell. So, when his agent suggested he audition for the part in Mortal Kombat, he was sceptical to say the least. After a very brief audition he assumed the part had gone to someone better versed in the action world, and was surprised, then delighted, then mildly terrified at the prospect of getting into fighting shape, when he get the call months later telling him that Kano was his.

“Nobody is more surprised that I am in this movie than I am,” he says. “It’s always an actor’s dream to do something you haven’t done before – but it doesn’t happen very often because it’s risky to cast an actor to do something that you haven’t seen them do before. So ultimately and inevitably you end up playing the same sort of things over and over and over again and that gets really dull.”

As if reinventing himself as an arse-kicking action actor wasn’t enough, Lawson was also working on Long Story Short, his feature second film as a writer-director when he was summoned to South Australia for the arduous Mortal Kombat shoot. While his intimate, time-bending romantic comedy, which was released in February, was about as far from the dumb-but-fun bloodfest on the movie spectrum as it could be, Lawson says he was actually struck by how much the two experiences had in common, whether it’s making a deadline, fixing a script or just figuring out the best way to tell the story.

Josh Lawson in director mode, on set of his film, Long Story Short.

“Ultimately you have a lot more toys to play with on a big budget shoot, but the challenges remain more or less the same,” he says.

“At one point we were shooting Mortal Kombat and editing Long Story Short in the same South Australian studios. I would finish shooting one of these scenes and they would say ‘OK, Josh, you have 30 minutes of down time’ and I would race into the editing room and be covered in blood and goo and have knives sticking out of me and I was an absolute sweaty mess.

“I would have 30 minutes of doing a rom-com going ‘OK, let’s put the kiss here and swell the music’ and then they would come back and say ‘Josh, you have to fight a giant lizard again in five minutes’. It was like the end of Mrs Doubtfire where Robin Williams is running between the two tables at the restaurant.”

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Lawson says that more than a decade of living in LA was starting to wear him down, and he’d been thinking about returning to Australia for good. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the US harder than almost anywhere in the world last year, that sealed the deal.

“I was missing home,” he says. “I felt like needed to be close to family and then of course COVID hit and maybe no time more than any other did I really want to be close to home at that point. So, it’s been lovely and I am happier now than I have been in a long time being back in Australia.”

Mortal Kombat opens in cinemas on Thursday.

Originally published as ‘Pig’s a---’: How Josh Lawson took Aussie swearing to next level playing Kano in Mortal Kombat