K Urban, Your Enthusiasm

Exclusive: Karl bigs up the forthcoming Doom movie

We’re big fans of Karl Urban here at Empire. The New Zealand actor absolutely rocked as Eomer in the last two Lord of the Rings movies, gave it his snarly all as the bad guy in The Chronicles Of Riddick, and was a worthy opponent for Maaaaaat Daaaaaamon in The Bourne Supremacy. He’s very cool and a Next Big Thing in waiting – oh, and our Picture Editor wants to fudd him silly.

So imagine our unconfined joy when we woke up this morning, talked to Karl on the phone and learned that the feeling was decidedly mutual (all except for the fudding thing, though – sorry Debs). “I really love your website,” said Urban, all the way from his base in NZ. “My agent is always baffled by how much I know about what’s going on, and I just tell him that I’ve been looking at Empire Online. I’ll say ‘what about this? What about this? How come Mark Wahlberg got that job? I wanted that job!’”

Bless ‘im. Mind you, we weren’t on the blower to Karl at 7 bloody am just to exchange platitudes. No, sirree – we were talking Doom, the upcoming movie version of the best-selling PC game about nasty mutant space beasties running amok on a research facility on Mars, and the tough hombres sent to stop them. “It really is quite a trip,” added Urban. “It’s relentless as through the course of the film, the hunters become the hunted. It’s not a film for bedwetters.”

Although The Rock, who plays the platoon’s grizzled leader, Sarge, is front and centre in the film’s promo campaign, it’s Urban’s wonderfully monikered hero John Grimm who eventually comes to the fore when all hell – perhaps literally, certainly metaphorically – breaks loose. “They were offering me the chance to be the Doom guy,” laughed Urban, “John Grimm is a character who’s really running away from his past. He’s a child prodigy of scientists and turned his back on all of that and chooses to go around killing things and blowing things up as an act of rebellion. And through the course of the film, he confronts his inner demons in order to triumph against all odds. At the end of the day, the story is about the birth of a superhero, if you will.”

If, after the soulless likes of Resident Evil and Street Fighter you’re currently rolling your eyes and groaning at the thought of another videogame adaptation, you may want to reconsider, for Doom looks to be a breed apart.

For starters, it’s going to be R-rated, and unapologetically violent, and for the main course, it’s got FPS. And if you haven’t played the game before, we should tell you that means First Person Shooter, debuted in an astonishing sequence (which Empire first saw at the San Diego Comic-Con) in which we, the audience, see the action through Grimm’s eyes as he stalks the corridors of the Martian facility armed with a huge gun, blasting beasties left, right and centre.

Running at around 10 minutes, it’s an exact replica of the look and feel of the game, and is simply stunning. “In some ways, it makes cinematic history in that, for the first time, the audience becomes the hero of the film,” said Urban, who confirmed that it is his arm that can be seen throughout the sequence, hefting and reloading the gun. “When we go into FPS, the audience is doing the rampage, the audience is doing the work and that is so cool. It’s insane!”

Doom is released on October 28, and we frankly can’t wait. Sadly, we’re gonna have to, so we recommend playing the game to kill some time until its release. Word to the wise, though: if Urban challenges you to a game, politely decline. “I used to play it around Vin Diesel’s place when we were shooting The Chronicles Of Riddick. Vin was far better at it than I was, he’s the man,” he said. “But I tell you what, after my Special Forces training for this? I’d give any cunt a run for their money. Bring ‘em on! That’s what I say! Bring ‘em on!!!”