Best Way to Celebrate LotR's 20th Anniversary? The Boys Mocking Karl Urban
Karl Urban currently is enjoying well-deserved acclaim for his performance as Billy Butcher in The Boys. But this is not the first of his iconic roles.
He starred in a good number of well-known franchises, including the Riddick films and the Jason Bourne series, before joining the 2009's Star Treck reboot (as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy) and 2012's Dredd (as Judge Dredd himself). So, even before The Boys Karl Urban had a fairly impressive resume.
However, his probably best-known role until Billy Butcher, was the role of Eomer in the second and third movies of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Though Eomer, the exiled nephew of the King of Rohan, was a relatively minor character in the movies, with lines in only a few scenes, Urban's performance was memorable enough and the sheer popularity of The Lord of the Rings was great enough to catapult him from playing secondary roles in TV series, such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spinoff Xena: Warrior Princess, into big leagues.
So of course the crew of The Boys did not miss the 20th anniversary of the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and celebrated it in the fashion not untypical for The Boys, by posting the side-by-side comparison of Karl as Billy Butcher and Eomer, and dubbing the latter as "Karl Rural":
The joke – a pretty polite one by The Boys' standards – was appreciated by the Twitter crowd, as was the fact that they did not forgot about that anniversary. One of the fans even continued it, by posting a picture of Karl Urban as Judge Dredd and subtitling it "Karl MegaUrban" (Judge Dredd, for those not familiar with the franchise, upholds the law in MegaCity One).
Production of The Boys Season 4 started this August, so, judging by the precedents of the previous seasons, we're likely to see Karl Urban on the screen again late in 2023 or, at worst, in the first half of 2024 (the third season had already demonstrated that the series has some trouble sticking to the season-per-year schedule).