Karl Urban fleshes out a younger Bones in 'Star Trek'

For several years now, New Zealand-born Karl Urban has been the guy filmmakers turned to if a character had to ride a horse, chuck a spear or run through the forest primeval in a breechcloth.In the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy he was Eomer , one of the riders of Rohan. In “Pathfinder” he played Ghost, a warrior of an Indian tribe battling Viking maraudersBut in director J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Trek,” opening Friday, the 36-year-old Urban gets to do something else entirely.He gets to be funny.More than that, he gets to portray a younger version of a character that every student of pop culture knows intimately: Dr. Leonard “Bones dvd” McCoy, the often-acerbic ship’s surgeon on the Enterprise.“This was a fantastic opportunity for me,” Urban said in a recent phone call from Hollywood. “I’m so grateful to J.J. for the opportunity to do a character so fundamentally different from anything I’ve done in such a long time. You certainly can’t call Bones McCoy an action hero.“The other thing that makes this so great is that I’m a long-term fan of the TV show. As a kid in New Zealand I would religiously be in front of the set every Saturday morning when ‘Star Trek’ came on.”In the new film Urban looks and behaves uncannily like the late DeForest Kelley, who played McCoy on the series and in several big-screen incarnations.“J.J. set forth a mandate that it was up to each of us in the cast to decide what aspects of these established characters we wanted to bring to the younger versions of them.“I tried to approach that not as an actor but as a fan ... if I wasn’t in this movie and was just somebody going to see it, how much continuity would I want with these characters that I grew up knowing and loving?“I decided I’d want a lot of continuity. My job was to identify the spirit and essence of what Mr. Kelley had done for 40 years and filter it through myself. The challenge was to not only honor that legacy, but to continue to explore it with a fresh eye.”Given the roars of audience approval that greeted Urban’s Bone-sian delivery of classic McCoy eruptions at a recent screening of “Star Trek” ("Dammit, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!"), it appears that Urban pulled it off. NCIS DVD“I read one reviewer who put forth the opinion that the most engaging parts of the movie are the character beats between the moments of sci-fi spectacle.“Which is fantastic, because that was always the inherent strength of ‘Star Trek’ — it was a character-driven show. You might forget about individual stories, but not the characters. They’re the glue. You engage with them and care about them. Disney 100 Years of Magic dvd