We Celebrate The Lord of the Rings

arl Urban is “in the middle of a complicated business deal at the moment,” he says on the phone from Vancouver. “So if that goes down we may have to resume the interview at another point in time.”

      It all sounds terribly important, and it probably is. Things are looking decidedly big for this 31-year-old New Zealand actor. He’s gone from appearing in TV soap operas and indie films to negotiating major movie deals that will determine whether his next job is in Melbourne, Los Angeles or Moscow. Or Vancouver, which is where he is currently filming The Chronicles of Riddick, the sci-fi sequel to Pitch Black, alongside box office heavyweights Vin Diesel and Dame Judi Dench.

      “I don’t have time to stop and reflect how far I’ve come,” he says. “At times it’s like my life is not my own business. Just when I think I have a plan for the next six months, something comes along and completely changes it. And then the very next day, something else will completely change that.”

      But rolling with the punches is something Urban is proving to be good at. His big break came when New Zealand film director Harry Sinclair showed another Kiwi director, Peter Jackson, the rough cuts from his film The Price of Milk. Urban went on to win a Best Actor nomination at the New Zealand Film Awards for his role and an impressed Jackson cast him as Eomer, the mighty Rohan warrior, in the second and third instalments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

      “I’d been making business trips to the States for quite a number of years, establishing contacts and representation,” says Urban. “I guess I was fortunate to be in Jackson’s face just at the right time and, incredibly, that first ‘big’ job was based in New Zealand.” Just how big no-one could predict. “My instincts were telling me that it would be popular. But I think the reception to the trilogy has blown away anybody’s expectations.

      “It was a truly incredible experience—and definitely physical. I mean, you’re doing these extraordinary heroic feats of swordsmanship and horse riding all under a tonne of armour!” he laughs. “I just don’t know how to describe the whole experience. It was phenomenal—getting to work with an extraordinarily talented, gifted and wonderful group of people. We worked hard but we also partied pretty hard. Towards the end of filming we were shooting six-day weeks, so we had a lot of ‘blow outs’ just to maintain our sanity!”

      As far as Urban is concerned, the highlight was working with top-class professionals—and working with them on home soil.

      “It gave me a great appreciation of New Zealand. I got to see more of my country in those 10 months than I had living there all my life. There are incredible aspects of New Zealand geography, straight out of the pages of Tolkien, that I never knew existed. Ironically, there were cast members from overseas who’d been on location longer than I, showing me around. Viggo Mortensen was showing me the best fishing spots!”

Urban legend

      There’s no denying that The Lord of the Rings has been instrumental in raising Urban’s international profile. Tap his name into a search engine on the internet and you come up with thousands of responses.

      “I don’t know if I’ll ever be finished with The Lord of the Rings. I think it’s one of those entities that continue to multiply and self-propagate. It’s part of my life and every day, in little ways, it impacts on my life and will continue to do so, on many levels, for some time to come.

      “I occasionally get stopped in the street, but that’s just part of it. If you want to dance with the devil, you have to pay the band. I actually enjoy meeting people who are so overwhelmingly appreciative and about a project that I’ve been involved with. When you do theatre you can tell immediately whether an audience like what you’re doing or not. So with a film, it’s nice all this time later to get the positive response.”

      After his time in Middle-earth, Urban went to Australia’s Gold Coast for four months to film Ghost Ship, and filming on The Chronicles of Riddick, where he plays a commander of a vast ‘army of death,’ is now almost done.

      So what’s it like working alongside Dame Judi Dench? “Pretty bloody good,” he laughs. “In one way it’s bizarre and then in another it makes perfect rational sense. I’ve been chipping away at the block for a very long time now, and every now and then I do look up and think, ‘OK, I’ve dug this far. I better keep going’.

      “It’s difficult for me to be objective about my acting. It’s interesting working with actors like Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen, and Judi Dench and Vin Diesel. If anything, it has introduced me to a more specific way of working—really defining the moment-to-moment beats.

      “It’s like playing tennis or golf. If you’re playing with good players, you can’t help but raise your game,” he says.

      “What I’ve learned is that you can never take your eye off the ball, not for a second. I invest a lot more time into what I’m doing these days than I used to.” And it’s an investment that is truly paying off.—Amanda Linnell