Rider of Rohan

“I was one of those Dungeons & Dragons boys,” admits Karl Uban, who plays Éomer in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. “Well, my friends were. I read The Lord of the Rings whe I was 12 years old, and then re-read it when I heard Peter Jackson was doing an adaptation. I desperately wanted to be a part of it. It was, I guess, a boyhood dream of mine to be involved in a project of such an epic nature, to be in a genre that I had enjoyed as a child. So it was quite a surprise for me when I got the call, asking if I would like to be involved in the project. They had already been shooting for seven months, so I thought I had missed the opportunity. Pete is good friends with Harry Sinclair, who directed me in The Price of Milk. Harry showed Peter a rough cut of that film, and I think it was directly due to that that I got offered the role of Éomer.”

For Urban, it became the experience of a lifetime. “I learned many, many, many lessons,” he says. “First of all, as an actor, let’s talk about some of the acting in these pictures. I had the privilege of watching such masters as Sir Ian McKellen, Bernard Hill and Viggo Mortensen ply their craft. I watched King Théoden [Hill] come out of his spell with the aid of Gandalf [McKellen] and, at the end of the scene, I saw Ian go up to Bernard, give him a hug and say, ‘I haven’t seen such good work in a long time.’

“I watched Viggo work with a scene and just saw how he explored the nature of it. With every take, he would come out and have a subtle little difference in his inflection. He constantly explored a scene and reinvigorated it, and he brought a freshness and spontaneity as he searched for its meaning. At the same time, he gave his director the freedom and luxury of choice. Peter was simultaneously shooting three films at once. He was attempting something that had never been attempted, I don’t think, in the history of cinema. Every day he had seven or eight monitors in front of him. Not only was he directing the unit in front of him, but he would be receiving satellite footage from four other units in the vicinity.

“He would direct them by cell phone and radio,” Urban explains. “But you could still go up to him in the middle of this and ask him a question pertaining to your character or anything else, and he could give you an answer on the spot. He was quite often in good humor. He has a great, dry sense of humor, great black humor. I never once saw Peter lose his cool, not once. There he was in some of the most trying, arduous situations for a director, shooting in continuity on the plains of Rohan. They were beautiful, golden, classic fields, and then we would turn up the next day and they would be covered with snow. Peter just said, ‘OK, well, what we’ll do is we’ll melt the snow. We’ll set the camera up here. We’ll frame the boys in here and…’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean? Melt the snow?’ Sure enough, 15 minutes later, there were 30 guys out there were those big flame-thrower heaters melting the snow. And in an hour-and-a-half, we were all ready, and we did it without skipping a beat. Peter was unflappable.”

Orc Killer

Éomer doesn’t appear in The Fellowship of the Ring, but he makes his presence felt in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The nephew of King Théoden and, in his own right, a master horseman and noble warrior, Éomer is willing to die to protect his land of Rohan and its people from the relentless forces of Saruman (Christopher Lee) and Sauron. Éomer, however, faces a trying dilemma: He loves and respects his uncle, but Théoden is a shell fo his former self, a man faltering under Saruman’s spell.

“Éomer is in a state of frustration about it,” says Urban, a 30-year-old New Zealander. “It’s about his inability to do anything in this situation without actually disobeying his king. That’s a very fine line, but that’s exactly what Saruman is trying to do. He’s trying to drive a wedge through the House of Earl and then come in and conquer. When we meet Éomer, we feel his sense of frustration. We see that the king has been rendered into this catatonic state with the aid of Wormtongue [Brad Dourif], who’s in league with Saruman. Éomer is really left to his own devices, and he has to single-handedly try and take care of this insurrection, this invasion. There was so much to play with this character. There was great content, and I had the chance to act against wonderful performers. Éomer is, by profession, an Orc killer. He goes out and protects the borders from the enemy. He has great integrity. He’s also hotheaded and proud and willful. Yet, at the same time, we get to see other facets of him—that he’s actually very compassionate, caring, empathetic and generous.”

Urban adds that he had the opportunity to help develop some of those facets on the set, as the cameras rolled. Jackson, despite the immensity of the production, allowed for and even encouraged spontaneity and improvisation. “We were shooting a sequence in Edoras and Peter said to me, ‘I feel like we need something here for you. This is the troops going out to war and we need something,’” Urban recalls. “So we had a look at the book and then he wrote some stuff down and said, ‘Here you go.’ So literally five minutes before the camera rolled, I was studying this new dialogue. I joked to him: ‘Here we are working on this big, huge Hollywood film and it seems no different than The Price of Milk.’ That’s the kind of film Peter used to do. It was a small, little $1.3 million New Zealand film. Peter laughed and we did the bit.

“The great thing about Peter is that he’s a collaborator. He’s open to collaboration. You can come to him with a suggestion or with an idea that you think might help improve the script, and he’s astute enough to know that your interest and his interest is to make the dialogue as clear and succinct and as good as it can possibly be. But he’s still very respectful of the writers and what they had written. So Peter was very exacting and knew what he wanted, and he would chip away until he was happy. He’s a perfectionist. I’ve never worked with a director who has such a complete command of his craft. Peter knows about sound, visual effects, cameras, characters, wardrobe, everything. He’s just so in command of it all.”

Master Horseman

Urban spends a great deal of his time in The Two Towers on the back of a horse. And it’s something to which he wasn’t accustomed in his everyday life. “I had a very limited amount of horseback riding experience before this production. Actually, it was the key for me into the character. I laid down a foundation for Éomer and that foundation was his ability as a horseman. He’s written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a consummate horseman and, as a result, I invested a lot of time and energy getting to that level of competence and excellence I felt this character needed to have. The horse wranglers were fantastic. They said, ‘If you can get to this level, then you can do it. You can do it all.’ I’m sort of proud and happy that I managed to get to the state where I was allowed to do my own horse riding. I think some of the most enjoyable moments I had working on this shoot were down at Edoras, in that glacial valley with the parallel mountains running down either side. We did a shot that’s in the third film, on this one day when there must have been 150 horse riders in formation, a large column, and at the head of it are King Théoden, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and me, and we’re riding out. It’s just spectacular. I mean, it’s like, ‘What a job!’ It was a spectacular feeling. On the ground there was the sound of these 150-odd horses and we were riding out in formation. It was an extraordinary experience.”

Preparing for the physical aspects of the Rings films led to at least one more unusual experience, this one more amusing than extraordinary. “My preparation was really on the go,” Urban explains. “One day I was on set and this guy was teaching me sword-fighting moves. He went away and one of the his young protégés came up and said, ‘You realize who that was?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that was Bob Anderson.’ He said, ‘Yeah Bob Anderson.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ He said, ‘This guy trained Errol Flynn.’ I said, ‘OK, so?’ He said, ‘This guy was Darth Vader.’ I was like, ‘You’re kidding! He was the guy in the costume? My God, I just had a sword fight with Darth Vader. That is so cool!’ [Anderson discussed his legendary career in STARLOG #252.]

“But my training was really on the job apart from the horse training. For the sword fights, any spare moments I had were spent working with the stunt coordinators. Each culture had its own unique, different style of fighting. Mine was bloody dirty, mate.”

Noble Warrior

The Rings features are not Urban’s first genre jaunts. The actor appeared in more than a dozen episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, playing such characters as Cupid and Julius Caesar. He also essayed Cupid in an episode of Hercules:The Legendary Journeys and later co-starred in the busted pilot for the proposed series Amazon High. More recently, he appeared in the horror films The Irrefutable Truth About Demons and Ghost Ship. Urban reports that those early jobs on Xena and Hercules were of great help to him, on several levels, when he arrived on the Rings set.

“I’ve been an actor for 10 years, and I’ve learned something on every single job that I’ve done,” he states. “Every added experience has prepared me for tackling the role of Éomer in Lord of the Rings. Xena and Hercules were no different. And the way it worked out, most of the crew that worked on Lord of the Rings came from doing Renaissance productions. They were able to take the level of craft that they had learned on those productions and amplify it to fit Lord of the Rings. Xena and Hercules were good experiences for me. It was stable work for many New Zealand actors. And many of the New Zealand actors who are starting to break out in the international area worked on those series. The New Zealand film industry is quite small, so you inevitably end up working on the same shows.”

As for Ghost Ship, Urban doesn’t have much to say about the Dark Castle release. “It was a pretty different experience. It’s not a film you want to take too seriously. It was sort of a light, easygoing film where people get their heads chopped off. I didn’t do any of the chopping. I got minced. That was my particular fate. It was fun. One of the best aspects about my job is that I’m constantly getting to acquire new skills. For the Lord of the Rings it was horse riding, and for Ghost Ship it was scuba diving.”

Still, it’s the trilogy that concerns him. “The Lord of the Rings is like no other project I’ve worked on before,” he says. “Just the sheer passion that the crew had is unparalleled. I’ve never been on a production where the crew walked around with copies of the book. You just don’t see the crew walking around with scripts. They usually don’t give a shit. It’s like, ‘Point the camera, set up the lights and let’s shoot this thing.’ But it was really clear on Lord of the Rings that the crew was inspired by the material they were working with. The material generated in the crew this obsessive curiosity. They needed to know what they were doing there.”

Urban does acknowledge that for all the terrific opportunities the Rings films afforded him—from the friendships he made to the improvisation to the potential of increasing his public profile in the eyes of producers and directors—the pressure was on as Jackson and the rest of the cast and crew went about transferring the saga from page to screen. “There was an immense pressure to get it right,” he admits. “We are all very aware that this is one of the greatest novels on the planet. There was a demand, a necessity, to get it right. In my opinion, I think Peter has done that. Peter and everyone—[costume designer] Ngila Dickson, [Wcta FX maestro] Richard Taylor and the actors—has done an extraordinary job of capturing the essence of this trilogy, of this book that took Tolkien 12 years to write. It has a fan base of millions and millions of people.

“I think, by and large, people weren’t disappointed with the first film,” Karl Urban offers. “I’m sure that those people are out there, but the fact that the film had such a phenomenal impact at the box office and that the sales of the DVDs and merchandising have gone so extraordinarily well gives you and indication of how Fellowship was received. But there was immense pressure—not just for us and from the fans, but New Line really went out on a limb for this thing. I shudder to thin what would have happened to that company if Fellowship of the Ring had bombed—if, God forbid, it hadn’t done well. Never before in the history of cinema has anyone simultaneously made three films. Usually what they do is make one, see how it’s received, and then they make the rest. So this was a really, really ballsy move by [the studio] to bet on Peter and a fine team of craftsmen.”

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