ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK
Karl Urban is Billy Butcher, a brutal eastender
how does it feel to go from being a part of the Marvel movie machine to a show that pokes fun at the Marvel movie machine?
I don’t necessarily think it pokes fun. Here’s the thing that I really responded to: it offers a different narrative. We have so many television shows and movies out there that are predominantly focused on the stereotypical idea we all have of superheroes. What intrigued me was reading this material and that being completely flipped, and seeing these superheroes were tragically flawed and anything but heroic. That appealed to me. It appealed to me that it was a story essentially about the little guy taking on the man.
When researching your character, did you sense that the writers were going to be able to give him a little bit more humanity than we might have seen in the comic?
The comic books are really the starting point for this. They are the genesis, but we’re not doing a verbatim adaptation. That comic was a product of its time, and of a certain mentality, and thankfully we’ve evolved a lot since then. I think Eric [Kripke] is interested in utilising this story as a vehicle to throw into light, if you will, modern themes like male chauvinistic attitudes, which were often predominant in the comics. There’s less graphic sexual content. It was pretty full-on and at times misogynistic. We’re just not doing that, which is fantastic. The comics were really a template, a starting point. The challenge for us is to dimensionalise these characters. They’re not just comics anymore. You can’t walk around just playing a character with a perpetual mug or a grin. There has to be a journey and an evolution and contrast and change. That’s the challenge.