Karl Urban and Malin Akerman’s new thriller
WITH KARL URBAN & MALIN AKERMAN
Star Trek star Karl Urban is set to shoot a thriller road movie with Billions star Malin Akerman. Urban, who is currently filming his hit Amazon Prime series, The Boys ,in Toronto, Canada, was supposed to film Cold Providence with Akerman early last year, also in Canada.
Instead, amid the global Covid-19 lockdowns, he hunkered down at home in New Zealand for the year. He left on February 1 to film the third season of The Boys, in which he stars as vigilante Billy Butcher, whose superhero foe is fellow-Kiwi star Antony Starr.
In Cold Providence, Urban plays Marty, a novelist with writer’s block and a mysterious bag of cash, who finds himself on the run with a woman, Gill, (Rampage star Akerman), who has troubling secrets of her own.
Multi Emmy-nominated UK directors and producers Bill Jones and Ben Timlett are on board to direct the “neo-noir” movie. The road movie will be packed with bleak violence and sexual tension and the directors describe the talents of Urban and Akerman as “unbelievable”. The movie is officially still in pre-production.
Cold Providence is set in the northern states of the US, and will be filmed in Vancouver, where it will utilise the snowcovered backdrops and picturesque city surrounds.
On Instagram this week, Akerman posted herself in the wide-open spaces befitting a road movie and told her followers the beautiful surroundings were her office for the day with the hashtags work and film — suggesting filming could be underway.
Akerman’s Gill is described as a classic femme fatale, who uses her allure to lure Urban’s Marty into her darkness. Urban’s character has just left an unhappy marriage and an unfaithful wife, taking all his cash with him and takes her on a new path, full of twists and turns.
The film is shaping up to have all the makings of a great road movie — with action and thrills mixed in with sex, romance, love and betrayal. There are high hopes for incredible chemistry between Urban and Akerman and the result may be both actors’ tour de force. Cold Providence could sit with the great road movies, such as:
True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Thelma & Louise.