The 2012 reboot of Dredd on the big screen was instantly adored by fans of the Judge Dredd comics, mainly because it was such an honest adaptation of the source material. What people may no know however, is that star Karl Urban had a lot to do with keeping it true to the comics, especially when it came to the film’s ever-popular poster.
During a panel at Dallas Fan Days 2018, Urban explained the love he found for the Dredd comics when he landed the titular role, and how he used that love to make both the movie and the poster as accurate as possible.
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“I took [the comics] intravenously. Yeah, I didn’t read many comics when I was a kid,” Urban began. “But Dredd was one of the ones that I didn’t read and, when I got the role, I went and bought every Judge Dredd comic that I could find and made a journal and photocopied. This is how kinda sacrilegiously those comics were to me. I wouldn’t even cut them out, I would photocopy panels that were of interest and include them. Some of those lines made it into the movie. I always looked to the comic for guidance. Dredd’s voice was described in one of the comics as being like a saw cutting though bone. That was my interpretation of that. Excellent description written in the comics.
“We were three quarters of the way shooting through Dredd and I realized that we had no key artwork for a poster and at some point they would want me to do a photo shoot and rather than come back so many months later and have to do that, I suggested we should do a poster shoot and this is what it should be. And I had my journal, and one of the panels that I had photocopied was from one of the comic books called America. And that’s actually what we shot. They took the American flag out, for obvious reasons. But the comic book was obviously set in a time post a corrupt president where everything had fallen apart and the justice system had taken over. That’s why.”
The actor went on to explain that the comic was a major inspiration for his role, and he definitely wants to go back and revisit the Judge in the future.
“Yeah, so no it was a huge inspiration on many levels,” he said. “I felt very blessed to have played it. I would love to do more. I was talking to the Rebellion guys about a year ago and they were developing Major City One which is basically … It’s a story, or series of stories, set in Major City One about a group of rookie Judges that Dredd kinda weaves his way through those stories. I would certainly love to do more.”
Would you like to see Karl Urban take on the role of Judge Dredd again in the future? Let us know in the comments!
