Karl Urban Was Trained to Do a Reverse 180 Turn For ‘The Bourne Supremacy’
Not many actors get trained to do stunts in Hollywood due to the enormous costs of doing so. Look at The Matrix Trilogy with Keanu Reeves, Hugo Weaving, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Ann Moss turning their amazing stunts with kung-fu, motorcycle chases, and amazing mid-air flips with wire work.
Despite studios’ hesitancy with stunt work, actor Karl Urban took a wild ride in The Bourne Supremacy during a car chase opposite Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne.
Karl Urban, the stunt driver
In an interview with GQ, Urban said he watched the first Bourne movie and said he’d love to do one of those movies. Wish granted with 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy.
“[My] character was pretty cold,” Urban explained of his character, Kirill, a secret Service assassin. “He was just working on the other side … I was playing him like a guy who was following his orders with just no emotion.”
One scene shows Kirill driving a BMW through the streets of Moscow. Because the crew didn’t have permission to shoot in Moscow, they paid off the cops to stop traffic at vital parts of the car chase scene so the crew could capture various angles. “They trained me to do a reverse 180 in a Mercedes G-Wagon” for a later scene in the chase, Urban shared.
Unlike the BMW, the G-Wagon rides more like an African safari truck rather than a sleek luxury car. Yet Urban pulled off the stunt perfectly. Behind the wagon was a camera station to capture the pertinent shots as Urban floored the engine. “That’s not CGI,” the veteran actor said.
Karl Urban performed more stunts on ‘The Boys’
Not letting an opportunity go to waste, Urban upped the ante on the hit Amazon Prime show The Boys, which focuses on nasty anti-superheroes led by Billy Butcher. The LA Times reports that The Boys‘ famous speedboat scene in Season 2 featured Billy ramming a beached whale. It was based on Urban’s love of speedboats in real life.
“The fun aspect was that we did it all very old school,” Urban explained. “All of the actors were in the boat, no doubles, and we were really flying along, jumping waves while a helicopter with a long lens did multiple passes. It takes old-school film technique to do it, and that means doing it for real.”
At the end of the chase, Billy and his crew end up covered in all kinds of whale nastiness, blood, intestines, and other stuff — all fake of course. But the gore that fans have come to love was in full force. The production crew actually let the actor pilot the boat and do his own stuntwork after seeing his skill with speedboats on Instagram.
Are more stunts in Karl Urban’s future?
Perhaps. Urban has stated he’d love to perform more stunts on the set of The Boys. He’s also got Star Trek 4 set to begin production at the end of 2022 for a December 2023 release, reports Giant Freakin’ Robot.
But don’t look for Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy to perform stunts any time soon on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. After all, he’s a doctor, not a stuntman.
