Aug 2008 - When Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat decided to try their luck in Hollywood, they opted for film roles that played off the personas they had created in their native Hong Kong. But when Jet Li decided to make the move to Hollywood, he boldly turned his back on the squeaky clean hero that audiences in Asia had come to love and took on the role of the ruthless villain in Lethal Weapon 4.
“They came to me with the role of the villain,” Li said in 1998, “and it was very different for me because in twenty-five films all I played was heroes. I was a little worried about that. I said, look at my face. ‘Look at my smile. Am I a villain?’ They said just turn it around. Use another face. So I said okay.”
It proved to be a smart move for the agile Asian action star. In his Hollywood debut, Li played an Asian triad henchman who got to kick Mel Gibson’s butt for most of the film. But even though he lost the final battle, he won over new American fans with his dazzling display of martial arts technique.
Li’s physical prowess results from extensive training that began when he was a child growing up in Communist China. He won five Mainland Wu Shu championships before he was a teenager. In 1974, at the age of eleven, he came to the U.S. to perform for President Richard Nixon as part of a cultural exchange program. The fluid and flamboyant Wu Shu style of martial arts also proved highly attractive to prospective filmmakers. Li recalled that in the same year he performed at the White House, a Hong Kong producer approached him about acting.
“A big movie company, the manager come up to me and say, ‘Your kung fu is pretty good. When you grow up do you want to become big movie star?’ But I was eleven years old. Then every year he came to me and say the same thing. Then five years later, I’m seventeen-years old. He said to me, ‘I don’t want to wait anymore, just shoot right now.’ So he gave me the leading role in my very first movie, The Shaolin Temple. I was seventeen years old. Then my life changed.”
Li would spend more than a dozen years playing monks, cops and morally upstanding heroes in such Hong Kong films such as Once Upon a Time in China, The Tai Chi Master, and My Father is a Hero. His decision to go against type for his American debut in 1998 surprised even Li who flashed his broad boyish grin as he described his character in Lethal Weapon 4 as “very interesting. The character is very young, very smart, very cold. He never uses a gun, just kung fu to kill the people.”
On that film, Li was able to bring over people like Hong Kong action director Corey Yuen with whom Li had worked on My Father is a Hero. Li also helped choreograph the fights, something he routinely did back in Hong Kong.
“In Hong Kong, I am not only the actor I also produce many of the movies, so I always work with the action director,” said Li, “We talk about the character first, what kind of character, and then we talk about the fight, what kind of style for this character.”
Part of the Hong Kong action tradition involves turning props into active rather than passive elements in a scene. In the jaw-dropping Fist of Legend, Li turns his belt into a weapon that saves him from being skewered by a samurai sword. And in Once Upon a Time in China, everything from moneybags to tables to liquor bottles gets incorporated into an extended duel. But Li worries that this style may not always translate well into American films.
“We need to talk about if maybe Hong Kong style is too much for the American audiences,” Li said with a grin, “Hong Kong style may be too much. Maybe use the door, use all the chairs, tables, [then grabbing my microphone] microphones. Maybe we need to take back a little bit.”
So far, American audiences have only gotten a taste of Li’s potential in his Hollywood films where the action star barely breaks a sweat. That’s why in between such Hollywood fare as Romeo Must Die, Cradle 2 the Grave, and Kiss of the Dragon, he’s gone back to Asia to make such classics as Hero and Fearless. But Li seems determined to bring some of that exuberant, over the top Hong Kong style to America. That’s reflected in this year’s Forbidden Kingdom, which was a China-U.S. co-production that shot in China with an American director and actor, and had a fun blend of east and west styles.
“I think if every day you ate hamburger and pizza,” Li Said, “sometimes you need to go to the Chinese restaurant and order Chinese food. You think pretty good, delicious because before you didn’t know. Different styles are better.”
On August 1, 2008 Li goes for a change of pace as well, taking on another villainous role, this time in the latest installment of The Mummy franchise. Li doesn’t have many lines in the film but then he’s never needed dialogue to impress anyone -- his hands and feet do most of the talking for him. And he proves to be quite eloquent.
