Karl Urban is going from Bones to Bloodsucker as he has just been cast as the villain in Screen Gem’s post-apocalyptic horror thriller Priest, where he will be playing the leader of a band of vampires. Details below, plus some video of Karl doing a hip hop dare, all in the name of charity.
Karl wearing the Black Hat
It seems that vampires are all the rage these days and Star Trek’s new Dr. McCoy is joining in on the trend. The Hollywood Reporter has the details on Urban’s follow-up to Star Trek:
Adapted by Cory Goodman from a TokyoPop comic, “Priest” is set in a world ravaged by war between man and vampires. Paul Bettany stars as a warrior priest and vampire fighter who teams with a sheriff (Cam Gigandet) and warrior priestess (Maggie Q) to track down a murderous band of vampires who have kidnapped his niece. Urban plays Black Hat, the evil leader of the bloodsuckers who was once a priest and hunter but now fancies himself a god of vampires.
Priest is schedule to come out August 2010, so is likely to go into production soon.
Teaser poster for ‘Priest’ featuring Bettany
MC Urban
In other Karl news, Urban spent the weekend of the 9th supporting the Big Night In Telethon in his native New Zealand. YouTube’s looking glass has a number of videos from the event, but the best is this on with Karl participating in the ‘Hip Hop Dare’ where they Karl takes the dare and dresses in MC Hammer pants and does some hip hop dancing.
Hm, first to comment…
Good for Karl, but not a movie I”m gonna watch, even on TV. Vampire AND horror movies are so not my cup of tea, even if they’re based on manga.
After nailing the role of McCoy, Urban should have no problem with this part!
No matter what, I bet Urban will bring some quality to the role that wouldn’t have been there without him. Urban rocks, and this movie just got a few notches better by having him in it.
Not that I’m likely to find out if that’s true firsthand; not my kind of film :/ But it’s good to see the man working.
Good god man! I’m a doctor, not a vampire!!
Looks pretty badass, even without Urban, but he makes it all that much better. I really hope McCoy gets more screen time in the next movie, but this movie looks like it’ll be worth checking out for sure.
Karl!! You bloodsucker!!!
“She…packed my bags…last night….pre-flight…9AM….”
Make sure you don’t do anything that associates you permanently with a specific decade.
Karl is still happily stuck in 1939 (LOTR) and 1965 (ST09) with a good chance to be trendy in 2009.
Or, maybe not.
Great! De KELLY was great at playing the antagonist too!
man i love K. Urban!
I thought doctors were blood suckers, opps thats 20th century doctors when they used needles to draw blood and fill you with drugs. In the 23rd century they have progressed beyond that.
But Mc Coy did play a 20th century as he said it “Witch Doctor” rescuing Chekov from his many story fall on the Navy’s CV-65 Enterprise Air Craft Carrier in STM4:The Voyage Home. And at the time he was giving out happy pills to little old and deathly ill grandma’s awaiting explpritory surgery.
^ Those pills the gave the old lady some how completely reversed her kidney dialysis. The wonders of future pharmaceuticals… :-)
#3. S. John Ross wrote: “No matter what, I bet Urban will bring some quality to the role that wouldn’t have been there without him.”
You’ve seen this right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=926icFvL4Y8
#11: No, I hadn’t! That’s really something :) Thankee.
As long as he doesn’t play a sparkly vampire…
Karl is certainly chowing down on genre roles. I hope that’s a good thing for him. Love him as Bones. Just wishing him the career he truly wants.
Nice to have a genre villain who doesn’t speak with a Brit accent anyway…
#3. S. John Ross wrote: “No matter what, I bet Urban will bring some quality to the role that wouldn’t have been there without him.”
BTW, I don’t disagree with you. I’ve seen Urban do some good work. And I’ve just seen him work.
My thoughts about his performance in Trek though differ from yours and most people for that matter. From the moment the trailers hit, it seems everyone has been raving about how well Urban did as McCoy. The so-called “haters” and over the top “lovers” alike were in agreement about how he “nailed” McCoy, despite their respective fears about the rest of the cast. But I was leery, yet decided to give it the benefit of the doubt until I saw the film. What I came away with was that of all the portrayals, Urban’s read false to me – and get this, it’s because it was so close to DeForest Kelley. There were those who were afraid Pine and Quinto, et al would end up doing impersonations of Shatner doing Kirk, etc. and yet Urban was the only one who actually came close to that. I felt all the rest of the cast, for good or bad, made those characters their own. By contrast, Urban seemed the most out of place to me in the film and the most disappointing because of it, not that he wasn’t good at it. To me he was Urban, imitating Kelley doing McCoy, made all the worse by the blatant McCoy-isms in the script.
In contrast, Scotty was always my favorite character, in no small part due to James Doohan’s portrayal. When I saw the trailers, I was absolutely mortified. I knew I was going to hate Simon Pegg’s comedic interpretation of him. I went in expecting to be disappointed. Yet, when Scotty finally appeared I found myself immediately accepting Pegg in the role. He made it his own and was still true to the spirit of the character. Short of some poor writing and directing choices for Scotty which were not Pegg’s fault, I felt like he nailed him.
The net effect is that I will watch Pegg, Pine, Quinto, Cho & Saldana and think: Scotty, Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhura. I will watch Urban and think De Kelley … and I will watch Anton Yelchin and wish Chekov were dead (but that really is not Yelchin’s fault either).
#16: “To me he was Urban, imitating Kelley doing McCoy, made all the worse by the blatant McCoy-isms in the script.”
My complaints about New Testament McCoy are mostly scripty, mainly because he was written as a caricature (ditto for most of the supporting cast, to which he was relegated, displaced in the Trinity by Uhura).
To me Urban’s performance just felt like an … overtly respectful … interpretation (the same way I see Scotty and Chekov). But I can certainly see where one fan’s “overtly respectful” would be another fan’s “distractingly imitative.”
But I do think – and I really think this is the core of it – if he hadn’t been written as a series of _references_ to Kelley’s McCoy – if he’d been written as something more than a checklist of “Stuff McCoy Might Say” – then Urban would have been able to knock it out of the park. In that, I feel the same about Urban as I do about Leonard Nimoy (I felt Elder Spock’s dialogue had a few too many wink-and-nod in-jokes that distracted from what would have been a great performance and made it feel more like a particularly well-done Saturday Night Live sketch with Nimoy as the night’s guest host).