Mortal Kombat 2 Writer and Karl Urban Explain Changes to Johnny Cage Character

Karl Urban wasn't someone many of us expected to be cast as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat 2. Urban is known for adapting to a variety of roles, but he's a risky choice for Johnny, a character many fans are desperate to see justice done after his complete absence in the first film.

As it turns out, Karl Urban was well aware of all the expectations surrounding Mortal Kombat 2. Because his sons warned him about this as soon as he was cast. In fact, as fans of the game, they had a simple message from their father: “Don't mess it up.”

Karl Urban knows how passionate the Mortal Kombat fan base is and how important his performance as Johnny Cage was.

Karl Urban, who plays Johnny Cage, stands in the parking lot next to his car.

Urban shared this story during a Mortal Kombat 2 press conference attended by TheGamer. Here he explains what happened when he found out he had been cast in the film.

“I remember first introducing the world of Mortal Kombat to my two sons, who were actually playing the game when I got cast: ‘Hi, I’m going to be Johnny Cage,’” Urban recalls. “They were like, ‘Oh, you have a big fan base. Don’t mess it up.’”

Urban admitted he felt pressured, but redirected himself to immerse himself in the role. He learned about Mortal Kombat and its real-world impact. This involved attending a karate tournament in New Zealand to get a feel for it and then reading Johnny as a character.

Interestingly, he applied what he learned about Johnny to his own performance, but it looks like this will be a very different version of the character.

“[I was] Investing time and energy into the world of Mortal Kombat and looking at everything in every game, what's the norm,” he explains. “Jeremy [Slater, writer] You did a great job. Because he didn't write characters driven by too much ego. This is a very despondent character, and it was a very smart choice because it gave me, and the audience, room to go with the character. “I gave him a trip.”

This was later backed up by Jeremy Slater himself, who stated that he felt the need to change Johnny's starting point in the film so that he could have a character arc.

“I think if you look at the way Johnny has been used traditionally in a lot of Mortal Kombat, he’s been the comic relief,” Slater says. “He was never a real hero. He was never the focus.

“We decided early on that we wanted to go on a journey with this guy. Let’s center this story around him. To do that, we had to reinvent the character a little bit. We had to start him in a different place,” he continues. “In some games, he's the biggest movie star on the planet. And when you start the character at that point, there's not a lot of room for him to grow or develop or achieve any kind of goal or dream. Johnny, on the other hand, starts in a more vulnerable position. He's a guy who may have had everything at one point and then lost it, and now sees it all slipping through his fingers.”

Slater says this helped him relate to Johnny more easily. However, it's worth highlighting that Johnny also almost starred in the first Mortal Kombat film adaptation in 1995. Here, he's just as arrogant and obsessed with his image and reputation as he was in the games, but he was tricked into entering Mortal Kombat tournaments to further his career, so he might not be all that different from what Slater wrote here.

We'll have to wait and see if Slater and Urban bring this version of the character to life when Mortal Kombat 2 hits theaters on May 8.