Thanks to fellow fan Kyisha for sharing this article with me!

Despite the generous thatch of beard – the obligatory castaway disguises favoured by the perennially too beautiful – actor Karl Urban is easily the best-looking guy in the café. He is being very well attended to by a young female waiter who is doubtless mesmerized by his large, clear, sincere, hazel eyes and tall, burly figure. I know how she feels. I am prepared for outrageous arrogance, but when Urban gets up to shake my hand and introduce himself, I realise he is a nervous wreck.

At first, Urban is less than eager to talk about himself. An early inquiry about his newborn son is deflected. He makes it clear that he is only doing this interview to publicise his two new films – Harry Sinclair’s The Price of Milk and Glenn Standring’s The Irrefutable Truth About Demons – both due out in March.

Urban, now 28, has reason to be wary of over-exposure. As a young lad of 20, he found celebrity in the first wave of Shortland Street fame, after playing gay ambulance driver Jamie Forrest. Women’s magazines turned him into a pin-up, writing stories detailing how the, “happy-go-lucky Gemini answers all his fan mail”, “likes a woman who knows what she wants” and “loves cooking Italian food, drinking white wine or whisky, surfing, skiing and watching the sun set”. Before long, Urban lost his anonymity and had to endure mindless heckling from strangers. “I couldn’t walk down the street without someone saying, ‘Hey, you’re that fag off Shortland Street, eh?’” He did what any self-respecting 20-year-old would do: went out and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

“At the time, I was quite wrapped up in it all. I thought that it was the greatest thing to have all this attention, and I thought if I was out there in the media, that would draw attention to myself and I thought the higher profile I had, the more work I would get.” He did get more work but… “at the end of the day, you have to be damn careful why you do it. I think it really serves no other purpose than to serve the ego, and I was no exception. I fell into that trap.”

And then Urban disappeared off the radar. He went to Sydney, where anonymity was waiting with open arms. He has described the Australian years variously as a “hiatus from acting” and “one of the lowest points in my life”. He lived at Bondi Beach and took acting classes for the first time. He even tried Stanislavski’s “method” technique. “It didn’t agree with me. Basically, I don’t actually believe in raping your personal experiences, your memories, for your work.” But no work followed, bar a few commercials.

He came home in 1996, not exactly with his tail between his legs, but older, wiser and more determined to become an “ac-taw”, rather than just another TV soap-hack. His first feature film was Scott reynold’s Heaven. Then came a part in Anthony McCarten’s Via Satellite, which earned him a best supporting actor nomination at the New Zealand Film Awards. In between, there was quite a lot of hack work. He also played Cupid on Hecules and Xena, and did three plays with the Auckland Theatre Company, including the lead in Foreskin’s Lament.

Talking to Urban, the impression is of a young man who would very much like to be taken seriously. At times he is overwhelmingly earnest, when a little bit of humour, nay irony, would do the trick. I ask him if he is drawn to slightly fantastical film scripts, what with the fairytale The Price of Milk, a film about demonic possession and a part in Lord of the Rings.

“The films do contain those fantasy elements, but at the end of the day, as an actor it’s your job to live truthfully in the moment and so, on that level, essentially, they’re no different to films in another genre. Instead of talking to a person, you might be talking to a dwarf…”

Or a cow. Actually, Urban is rather good in The Price of Milk, as diary-farmer Rob, a simple, kind-hearted fellow with 117 cows. Must be those clear, sincere hazel eyes. I wish I had seen The Irrefutable Truth About Demons before I interviewed him because I would like to ask him why he did it – the film is diabolical, in every sense of the word. Urban plays an anthropologist, Harry, who has a rather bad night out. He describes it as a “story about a man who’s lost faith in himself and becomes weak and susceptible to evil forces, which prey on him”. He is also forced to wear an ostentatious array of World-designed clothes, as are the rest of the cast, who are kitted out for a camp S&M party.

I’m worried that he might look equally ridiculous in Lord of the Rings, as Eomer, warrior of Rohan. They dyed his eyebrows and beard blond. “They used various processes on it,” says Urban. “Sometimes they coloured it each day, sometimes they bleached it, and there was this beautiful $12,000 blond wig made of Russian hair.”

Eventually, after a lot of dull chat about fabulous directors and talented co-stars, not to mention the noble craft of acting, Urban softens to the idea of talking about himself. I ask him what he was like at school. “Disruptive. Attention-seeking.” The perfect qualities for an actor! “Yeah,” he laughs heartily, for the first time in the interview, “Me. Me. Me.” Urban is really critical of his younger self. “When I was 16, 17, I … kind of umm … I’m trying to figure out how to say this. I wasn’t focused on anything scholastic. I was more interested in sex and drugs at that point.” Isn’t everybody? “Yeah. I was terrible, though. I look back at how I was then and as a young man … I think that I was really kind of … what’s the word? … Stupid.

“I don’t think I had any real concept of what a relationship was. To me, going to the movies was just foreplay, for my ultimate goal, which was to get into a girl’s pants. And I just look back and I cringe and it was just … I really wish I could go back to all those people and apologise for who I was back then.”

Clearly, being a dad – to three-moth-old Hunter – is getting to Urban. “I don’t necessarily feel any older or more mature, I just think that … now there’s an inherent awareness of responsibility. And I like it.”

So, the pin-up has finally grown up? “Oh God yea. What do you know at 20 years old? You know nothing. At 20, you know, I thought I was the shit. Now I look back and I realize … I was shit.”