“It’s a calibrated choice,” smiles Karl Urban when asked about whether his character Billy Butcher enjoys violently beating up and often killing the bad guys. “I want to intentionally signal to the audience, you better watch out, when Butcher smiles, when he’s enjoying it, shit’s about to hit the wall!” he laughs.
Urban, who stars on the show as leader of “the Boys,” the misfit band of vigilantes hell-bent on destroying the rogue superheroes at the center of the story, says that enjoyment comes from his character’s need for catharsis. “It’s an opportunity to get all of that anguish and that angst and that toxicity out of his body over his entire life and take it out on something and someone,” he says. Watch our exclusive video interview with Urban above.
SEE ‘The Boys’ season 2 looks and sounds like a winner to guilds
Amazon Prime’s blockbuster action satire “The Boys” depicts a world in which real-life superheroes are revered as celebrity gods keeping the community safe. Writer/director Eric Kripke developed the series for the screen, based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Urban stars alongside Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Chace Crawford and Erin Moriarty, with Aya Cash joining the show for its second season. The satirical action drama explores what happens when these heroes go rogue and abuse their powers, telling a highly entertaining cautionary tale about celebrity worship, materialism, fame and greed.
The show’s second season has been a hit with fans and critics alike, scoring an impressive 97% at Rotten Tomatoes. While the season goes even darker as we discover one of the “supes” is an evil immortal Nazi, we also learn more about Butcher’s past and who this guys is underneath his tough take-no-prisoners exterior.
“It was very much about humanizing him getting to a deeper understanding of who he is,” Urban explains. “Personally, how I look at Butcher is that there’s this dual nature about him. I do believe he has an inherent deep nobility. It is buried and there is a war that is raging within, this war of that beast that lives within him that rages against the morality, and that is a fun conflict that I get the opportunity to play.”
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