Josh Lawson talks ‘Kano’, the foul-mouthed Mortal Kombat villain we hate to love: “I was surprised with how far I could push it”
Playing a villain in a video game adaptation might seem off-script for Josh Lawson, but the actor’s artful abuse of the English language has made him the unlikely comedic hero of Mortal Kombat.
Eighteen months after landing the role of a foul-mouthed, villainous action star in the latest Warner Bros. film adaptation of cult 90s video game Mortal Kombat, Josh Lawson is still shaking off the surprise.
The 39-year-old’s acting career is littered with roles in rom-coms and dramas; nothing remotely similar to the iconic character he took on for the action flick.
“The fact that I’m in the film at all is a shock; to me more than anyone else,” Lawson said ahead of the film’s Sydney premiere.
“When the audition came my way, my agents called me up and said ‘Mortal Kombat’s happening’, and I said, ‘Great, good for them’.
They asked if he’d like to audition for the role of Kano, a self-serving, lizard-killing Aussie mercenary.
“I said ‘well, that’s going to be a waste of everyone’s time’.”
The actor got a call a few months later to say he’d landed the role in the martial arts movie, which was filmed in South Australia just before the pandemic.
Lawson’s degenerate character lends most, if not all of the humour to the film, which centres around an epic battle for the universe between champions of Earth including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Cole Young (Lewis Tan) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) and their enemies from the Outerworld.
“I was trying to make Kano someone you’d see in a bar in the country and gets kicked out for trying to pick fights and stuff,” Lawson said.
Lawson’s talent for improv is well known, thanks to his regular cameos on comedy series Thank God You’re Here, and he took plenty of liberties with Kano.
“I was surprised with how far I could push it,” he said. At the end of each day Simon (McQuoid, the film’s director) would say kind of gleefully ‘yeah, go more’”.
“I think the Americans also like amping up the Australian quality a bit more … it makes us seem a little more exotic than we actually are.”
While parts of the film were shot in some of the country’s most remote locations, Lawson said the international cast – which included Brooks, Tan and Joe Taslim - never got to meet any real life ‘Kanos’.
“It really wasn’t the Kano experience,” Lawson said. “It was like ‘let’s go and have a drink in Australia, in a great bar, and then [say] ‘um we’ll get half a dozen oysters; where are they from? Is this farm to table?”
But it was the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, the otherworldly backdrop for much of Mortal Kombat’s intergalactic battles, which offered the most memorable dining experience for the cast and crew.
“There was a time where we went to have a drink at the best restaurant in Coober Pedy, and I believe that was a service station,” Lawson explained. “And that’s not a joke, I’m not trying to be funny it genuinely was what we were recommended to be the best grub in town. That was super Aussie. It was all deep fried, yeah and you kind of want it to be out there.”
“But we had a great time, and at the end of the week we let off a bit of steam at the servo.”
Despite the intense physical preparation for the role – which included 4am workouts and copious servings of chicken breast and protein powder – Lawson said he was eager to reprise the role if another instalment was to get the green light.
“As proud as I was at the transformation that I had gone through, it wasn’t nearly as impressive as what these other guys had done,” he said.
“I turned up on set and I was like the smallest dude there, so if there’s a sequel - and I hope there is - and Kano gets to be 2.0, I’d love to push that even further and see how much I can change physically and make Kano even more menacing.”
The timing for the film’s release couldn’t be better, coinciding with the easing of restrictions and the reopening of cinemas throughout much of the US last month. And with its full-throttle action scenes and compelling visual effects, Lawson agrees a movie like this needs to be seen on the big screen.
“It’s epic and it’s a big movie, and I think it’s’, you want that full immersion, so it feels like a good post lockdown film.”
Mortal Kombat is now airing in cinemas.