The Boys' Karl Urban Recruited A Lord Of The Rings Vet To Help With Billy's Accent
There's a lot of swearing on the Prime Video series "The Boys," based on the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, but the most satisfying swears on the series come with a cockney accent. Billy Butcher, the embittered Englishman played by Karl Urban, swears like a sailor on shore leave, and he does so with gusto. But how exactly did Urban, a New Zealand native, manage to create such a killer cockney accent? It turns out he had a little help from an old friend from his time on Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" — dialect coach Andrew Jack. The two first worked together on "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," where Jack helped shape the sounds of Middle Earth and taught Urban how to speak like Éomer, leader of the Riders of Rohan.
In an interview with Hypebeast, Urban discussed the details of working with a prestigious dialect coach to create the perfect cockney accent for Butcher. He's not the only Kiwi to contend with an accent on the series, either, as Antony Starr (Homelander) manages an all-American accent despite being from New Zealand as well! They might be on opposite sides on the series, but these two New Zealand boys both did some seriously impressive accent work.
Creating Butcher's exact accent
There are some great references to Butcher's British origins in "The Boys," like his amazing "Spice Girls speech" in season 1, but the cockney accent is what really sells it. So in order to create the perfect dialect, he called in one of the best coaches in the business:
"It's kind of the perfect storm because you have a British character, played by a New Zealand actor, written by American writers and in the first season I had a Canadian dialect coach. At the end of the first season I identified that there was certain elements of authenticity that could be improved, so I brought in Andrew Jack, who was one of the foremost, world-class dialogue coaches. I had first worked with him 20 years ago on 'Lord of the Rings.' He came in and we significantly improved the specificity of the dialect and he was able to contribute more colloquialisms to give that character more authenticity and I was super excited about where we were going to go, but really tragically he was one of the first victims of the pandemic, he was working on 'The Batman' and he passed."
Jack was one of the greatest dialect coaches around, with credits that included everything from "The Last of the Mohicans" to Marvel movies, and his contributions to Urban's cockney accent didn't go unnoticed. It's a great performance made even better with dialect details, and we all have Jack to thank.