Elysium: District 9 prawn star goes bad

Sharlto Copley boots the bad into villain in Neill Blomkamp's big-budget second feature Elysium.

When Neill Blomkamp's District 9 became a hit, it made an unlikely star of its unknown lead actor Sharlto Copley.

"Unlikely" because while the 30-something Copley had done some acting, he was working in television in South Africa as a producer and director. Acting wasn't really his thing.

Copley had given a teenage Blomkamp his first job in his visual effects house and produced the young director's Alive in Joburg, the spectacular short about insectoid ETs taking up residence in a Johannesburg shantytown that became the blueprint for District 9, the feature that cast Copley as Wickus, the lowly government official who picks up a nasty bug from his work in the alien refugee camps.

Blomkamp's big-budget second feature Elysium reunites the pair. Though this time Copley is in the supporting role of Kruger, the film's villain.

He's a merciless mercenary armed with a thick South African accent, a spectacular personal armoury and no redeeming qualities. He leads a squad charged with keeping Elysium - the giant space station to where the rich have escaped the 22nd century squalor and pollution of Earth - safe from invasion.

That brings him head-to-head with Matt Damon's Max, a desperate man determined to break into the orbiting utopia. Copley talked to TimeOut from somewhere on the Elysium promotional trail in Sydney ...

Did you have to audition?

Yes. In a weird way yes. Believe it or not. It wasn't that Neil didn't think I could do it ... . he had shown me one of the early draft versions and I said "just so you know I would want to do the villain in this." He wasn't written as a South African at that time but I felt we could do something different enough. And he was in two minds about it for quite a long time and asked me "Can you put some stuff on tape so I can just see what you would do?" I sent him different versions of Kruger - an Eastern European, a British, American and three South Africans. He just wrote back just laughing "oh god, ok it must be you." It's pretty funny.

Three different South African versions?

One was much more Afrikaans. Though Kruger would be perceived as Afrikaans to most people. He isn't really - he's based on a stereotype of guys from the the south of Johannesburg who are normally English South African. That sort of accent and style and speaking and sarcastic sense of humour comes from them. And the military side comes from 32 Battalion [the infamous apartheid era SA army unit]. I was trying to find a kind of human position to play Kruger from. When you are playing a villain, I think you have to find some justification for the character's behaviour, so you can play him convincingly.

Did you really need to do so much preparation?

I think so because this was the character who was the most removed from my natural personality. So I really had to go and draw on real stuff and make sure I wasn't doing my movie version of other villains that I had seen.

Any qualms about making a South African the bad guy?

I was concerned and so was Neill, to be honest, about portraying white South Africans as the villains again. One of the things that I was most proud of with District 9 was what we had with the character of Wickus - he represented what a lot of white South Africa had done. They had gone through a lot of difficult things, done the right thing ethically and morally at the end of the day. To go back and portray the negative image again was bit of a worry for me.

Well your Mr Kruger sure has absolutely no redeeming qualities ...

Instinctively as an actor I am trying to put those in. But in a popcorn movie like this you find that if the character is too likeable, it kind of detracts from the hero's story. So in the final cut, sadly for me, you see the worst version of Kruger. But it works for the movie.

And a District 10?

We have been talking about District 10 since District 9 and it's a question of timing and all the ducks lining up in a row. There is now a treatment for it which is amazing. I think it's more of a question of when rather than if.

Follow @nzherald_ent on Twitter for all the latest entertainment news.

- TimeOut