Karl Urban says his two sons gave him one blunt piece of advice when he told them he had landed Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat 2: “Oof, big fanbase. Don't f**k it up.”
That warning stuck with Urban, who said he felt the pressure from fans because Johnny Cage was absent from the first Mortal Kombat film. The sequel is scheduled to hit theatres on May 8, and Urban said he treated the role like homework, studying the game’s canon, reading up on Cage and even going to a karate tournament in New Zealand to get a feel for the character.
Urban said Mortal Kombat was his first introduction to the franchise, and that he had to learn the world from the ground up. He described the process as “investing time and energy into the world of Mortal Kombat and looking at everything in all the games, what's canon,” a level of prep he said was driven in part by what his sons told him after he broke the casting news with, “Hey guys, I'm going to be Johnny Cage.”
Jeremy Slater, who wrote the film, said the team decided early to center Mortal Kombat 2 on Cage, but not as the swaggering showboat fans might expect. He said, “I think traditionally, if you look at the way Johnny's been used in a lot of Mortal Kombat, he's been the comic relief. He's never really the hero. He's never really been the focal point.”
Instead, Slater said they started him from a more vulnerable place so the role could grow. “We decided early on, let's really go on a journey with this guy. Let's centre this story around him,” he said, adding that they needed “you had to start him in a different place” — “a guy who maybe had it all at one point and then lost it, and now is sort of seeing it all slip through his fingers.” Urban said that fit the version he found on screen: “Jeremy Slater did not write Johnny Cage as a character fueled by so much ego,” he said, calling this Cage “a very dispirited character.”
The setup matters because the studio is asking fans to accept a famous, often arrogant character as something else first: vulnerable, bruised and still becoming the hero. That is the bet behind Mortal Kombat 2, and it is why Urban’s son’s warning may have been the most useful note he got before stepping into the part.