“It’s the template”: the most influential acting performance of the 1960s, according to Karl Urban
If you’re an actor looking to build up a fanbase, then there’s one surefire way to do it these days: aim for the geeks. For good or bad, those comic book fans are absolutely obsessed with the raft of movies and TV shows we’ve seen over the last 15 years, and Karl Urban has been at the centre of several of them.
The New Zealand born actor is arguably the king of the kind of content that gets ‘mum’s basement’ types all hot under the collar, having appeared in some of the most successful nerd-baiting franchises in history, not least two of Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking Lord of the Rings movies, plus Star Trek, the Doom video game adaptation and the outrageously overlooked Alex Garland comic book adaptation Dredd from 2012.
Most recently, of course, he’s been one of the lead characters in one of the more successful superhero TV shows of recent times, Prime Video’s The Boys, which comes to an end with the current season, and during which Urban has dispatched plenty of badly behaved folk in all manner of violent ways as Billy Butcher, leader of The Boys and CIA Black Ops agent.
And now Urban, who obviously knows which side his bread is buttered (it’s the side with all the lucrative video games on it), is once again dipping into the world of Wotsit-stained fingers and steelbook Blu-Rays with the very ‘ripping off heads and pulling out spines’ sequel Mortal Kombat II, which is already doing big business in the US and could well do the same in cinemas over here.
Given his predilection for comic book and superhero fare (he also appeared in Marvel’s Thor Ragnarok and had a cameo as a stormtrooper in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker just to complete the set), it’s possibly surprising that in terms of inspiration and his favourite films he doesn’t go for the kind of classic sci-fi you might imagine, but instead cites one of the greatest prison movies of all time from 1967.
He told Rotten Tomatoes, “One of the inspirational films for me, Cool Hand Luke. Paul Newman. He’s just phenomenal. I mean, really. It’s the template for many films. You know, Jack Nicholson in [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest, it’s the same kind of thing, the individual against the system. ‘What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach’. I love that film. Love it.”
You can’t fault Urban on this one. Cool Hand Luke may very well be a perfect movie. With Newman’s astonishing central performance as a man sent to jail for vandalising parking metres and ending up railing against the entire institution, it has it all: violence, comedy, tragedy, and of course a moment for the ages in the lead character trying to eat 50 boiled eggs in one go.
It was rightly a hit on release with critics and audiences alike, making back five times what it cost to produce at the box office and scooping four Academy Awards, winning one for George Kennedy as ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
One of only a few movies in history to sport a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Cool Hand Luke, which was directed by The Amityville Horror’s Stuart Rosenberg, regularly appears in the round-ups of the greatest films of all time.
