Karl Urban has appeared in three Star Trek films as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, and it turns out, he has also appeared in that other big franchise. The actor has now revealed a cameo in J.J. Abrams’ latest movie.
I’m a doctor, not and a stormtrooper
Karl Urban has revealed he has an uncredited role in the 2019 film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. He let the secret out in an interview with Digital Spy while promoting his Amazon series The Boys, saying:
“I had the good fortune to go and visit JJ Abrams [the film’s director] while he was shooting The Rise of Skywalker. While I was there, he put me in a stormtrooper uniform and we had a really fun day on set… It’s been one of my life-long goals to be a stormtrooper, so I can tick that off now.”
According to the actor, he plays one of the two stormtroopers standing guard as Kylo Ren walks by with the Knights of Ren. He even has a line, saying “Knights of Ren,” as they pass by.
Karl Urban is one of these two stormtroopers
Urban is a big fan of Star Trek and in 2013 he said he had planned to limit himself to just one of the two “Star” franchises, even after J.J. Abrams had made the switch. The actor told IGN, “I’ve made a commitment to Star Trek and I’m going to keep it. It wouldn’t feel right to me. Being in Star Trek, to suddenly be in Star Wars wouldn’t feel right to me.” But in 2018 he told LRM that after seeing his Star Trek co-star Simon Pegg play the alien Unkar Plutt in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he was open to the idea of appearing in a Star Wars film in a way where he would not be recognizable, which is exactly what happened.
Karl Urban with his Star Trek (2009) co-stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Zoe Saldana along with director J.J. Abrams
Urban will next be seen in the second season of Amazon’s irreverent superhero show The Boys, which premieres on September 4th. You can see the trailer below.
Keep up with all the Star Trek celebrity news at TrekMovie.com.
Karl Urban was in a Star Wars movie! Wow, I didn’t know that before.
He’s a great actor. I liked him as Dr. McCoy in the three Star Trek films.
J.J. Abrams is a nice guy but his movies are not perfect to say the least. He’s no Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese but I respect his talent.
His Star Trek and Star Wars films are not masterpieces and that’s okay. Both franchises will move on to better things. He got his 15 minutes of fame already.
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker was descent at best and awful at worst.
Let’s keep it at that.
Both franchises turned in very bad directions since the turn of the millennium, thankfully we can still enjoy everything before that.
At least Star Wars has The Mandalorian. Michael Biehn in Season 2 is pretty cool news. He’d be great as a Captain or Admiral in Star Trek.
The Mandalorian is a masterpiece
Yep. At least Star Wars is getting better with The Mandalorian.
This feels like an opportunity to mention once again what a steaming hot pile of garbage ROS was. Made even worse when the Trevorrow’s alleged Duel of the Fates was revealed. Who knows? Perhaps his DotF would not have been very good either by the time it got to shooting stage. But I do know it likely would not have been nearly as terrible as JJ’s ROS.
I mean, bringing back Palpatine? It would have made more sense to bring back Snoke.
The utterly confusing thing about Palpatine is the fact we are given zero answers with regards to how he came back in TROS. Is this a clone or is it the same Palpatine from ROTJ?
And of course we have the grand-daughter thing with Rey which seems absurd to me. I don’t believe for a second that this was the plan in 2012-2015. Or even 2016-2017. Abrams seems to have wanted to go for a I Am Your Father thing, but it’s not even trying to make sense.
The sequels really don’t feel that original do they? Or particularly exciting. Ep. 7 is actually pretty good and if No. 8 and 9 had built from that, it could have been a superb trilogy. Lucas should have got back in there as a full on consultant for No.8 and 9. I think if Disney asked him, he would have said Yes. But they wanted all the money for themselves of course, and definitely are risk averse.
This is just classic JJ Abrams. His genre films are all derivative of prior installments and his stories always have very flimsy structures that he tries to hide thru quick cuts, big action and constantly moving from one scene to the next before you have a chance to examine any of it too closely.
Upon viewing The Force Awakens, I was struck by how similar it was in plot and structure to A New Hope and it immediately became obvious to me that he wanted to simply copy the original trilogy. Even after Rian Johnson tried to twist it all around to subvert every belief and expectation we had about the characters and the lore (a mistake itself in my opinion), Abrams twisted it back around again so that Rise of Skywalker basically follows the same structure of Return of the Jedi, right down to the final space battle, the confrontation between the hero and Palpatine, and the redemption and self-sacrifice of a prior villain.
Of course Palpatine was NEVER part of the original plan. It feels like no one bothered to map out the sequel series one bit. They let JJ set things up in 7 (which did a good job introducing Rey but what they did with her in that in the same movie was insulting). Then Johnson came in and did what he wanted to do. I did not have too many issues with TLJ. At least it was its own story and not a rip off of what came before, which JJ did. But it did have a “final installment” feel to it. Something a middle act should NEVER have. That film made it amazingly difficult for the Ep 9 writers. Colin had a decent idea, however. Too bad we never saw that. Admittedly I am likely embracing that script because I’m comparing it to RoS. But that’s the way things went down.
And yes… The concept of Rey being Palp’s granddaughter… First… Ew. 2nd, we’ve seen a character deal with an evil family member already. So here is JJ copying what we all already saw. Let’s face it… JJ is capable of making a blockbuster but if you are looking for something more than spectacle JJ is unable to deliver. His two SW flicks stole from themselves, too. Only Johnson gave us something fairly unique. It wasn’t great but was easily the best of the sequels.
Right, that’s the problem I had with the new trilogy, they sort of flirted with being bold and different but ended up serving us the same old stuff. Even TLJ, for all its supposed freshness, has the hero go through a trippy cave sequence, get a big revelation from the villain about the subject of family, and ends with a small broken band of rebels on the run from a big bad empire. Seems awfully familiar.
Bringing back Palpatine didn’t make any sense. Rey being related to Palpatine is absurd. Disney screwed up and they know it.
Duel of the Fates could have been better than what we actually got. ROS is a total failure. The Last Jedi is a better movie.
Yeah… The Palpatine thing set me off before I even set foot in the theater. I kept wondering how a guy who was electrocuted, tossed down an abyss, blown up and then blown up again could possibly have come back. As a result, when he was defeated in the end, it was impossible to believe he was REALLY gone. Perhaps a really imaginative mind better at creating stories than mine could come up with something better than repeating a vague line from the gawdawful prequels. Too bad JJ and Terrio weren’t them.
Zombie Clone Palpatine ranks as the worst major pop cultural decision of my lifetime and instantly turns that trilogy into a farce. Disney execs bear plenty of blame too in addition to Kennedy, Abrams, Terrio. (This is what is so depressing about the current state of Trek when one considers that Abrams is still more talented than Kurtzman, eesh…) And the protractor dagger scavenger hunt in ROS was stupider than anything in Phantom Menace. At least Jar Jar’s climatic action moments were meticulously based on classic Buster Keaton sequences.
Star Wars is stupid.
Though to be positive, people do seem to like the performances of Anson Mount and Doug Jones.
Karl Urban is a geek superfan who also happens to be a successful actor. He was an elf in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, a secret alien in a “Star Wars” movie, a grizzled battler of evil superheroes in “The Boys”, freakin’ Judge Dredd, and of course Bones McCoy, easily one of the best things about the most recent “Star Trek“ movies. Truly, he is living his best version of his life.
He played Eomer – a human from Rohan – in the Lord of the Rings…
you forgot Scurge(may not be correct spelling)in Thor Ragnarok
I loved “The Force Awakens.” I loved “The Last Jedi,” too, even though it undid certain aspects of “The Force Awakens.” Then along came “The Rise of Skywalker,” which undid the entire series and is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I never need to see the name J.J. Abrams on a movie again.
You loved TFA, but you hated Rise of Skywalker, so you do not want see any more JJ Abrams movies. Sorry, I do not get that logic.
And it is one of the worst movies you have ever seen? How many movies have you seen in your life? 3?
Serious: If you want to see really bad movies you should check out FanboyFlicks on YouTube…
I’m a 46-year-old who until recently managed a movie theatre. So I’ve seen plenty of movies in my life, thank you. I don’t need a YouTube channel to tell me what is and isn’t a bad movie; I’ve got my own set of artistic values to do that for me.
There’s no “logic” to “get” with my response to The Rise of Skywalker. It’s a purely emotional reaction. The movie is a terrible piece of garbage, beginning to end. If it had been directed by a resurrected Alfred Hitchcock, I’d swear his movies off, too. Now, granted, I probably will check the next Abrams movie out; I’ve liked most of his other work. But it will take a lot for me to ever be glad to see his name on a movie again.
I appreciated how eccentric The Last Jedi was for a picture of that scale (obviously too eccentric for many viewers.) It’s funny, I’ve been a mild/moderate Star Wars enthusiast for most of my life, but it never occurred to me to “personally identify” with Luke Skywalker. The very notion sounds absurd, especially for an adult. (I don’t think I identified with him much as a youth either- he’s dorky in the first film, whiny in the second film, and smug in the third film.) So it didn’t bother me in the slightest that he became a disgruntled hobo sullying his beard with green milk (before his heroic redemption.) Even war heroes would be traumatized by their students being murdered by their other students. It would likely lead one to question one’s teaching abilities.
Great points. Luke is kind of a cipher until TLJ where we see what happens when the hope of the entire galaxy is put on the shoulders of some kid. What that movie did was deconstruct the trope of the Destined Hero, because it shows what can happen afterwards; overambition, failure, disillusionment. As a kid he lost his guardians early so he had nothing to lose. By the time he set up the New Jedi Academy he had more to lose and he felt it keenly.
I think I would have liked Episode IX to follow TLJ’s threads better; Rey doesn’t come from any special lineage, but it’s the family she created in the Resistance that gives her strength, and hope that Kylo will become Ben again. Maybe showing us where that optimism comes from, given the hardscrabble life she led. And Kylo’s arc back to the light. Maybe that means, with Snoke gone, you need a tertiary antagonist if Ben abandons the First Order, but it would have to feel natural. Like, Hux rising in his place. No need to bring in any secret fleets or Allegiant Generals or whatnot. But what’s done is done.
I agree with those points but for me, like Vader before him, Kylo HAD to die. He has done far too many evil irredeemable acts. Sure, his final act could be to help defeat the First Order. But he had to die. If he lived, even with a selfless act in the end, he would be a war criminal.
I never really cared about Star Wars but yes Luke Skywalker is not a hero.
What?
The Last Jedi is a better movie compared to Rise of Skywalker. The Force Awakens was good too. JJ Abrams should stay away from Star Wars now.
Nothing incentivises hyperbole like Rise of the Skywalker…
Who didn’t.