The one actor Jackie Chan always knew was out of his league: “I could never be him”
Martial arts may have been the genre that gave him a foothold in cinema, but Jackie Chan knew that in order to become an international superstar, he couldn’t let himself be pigeonholed.
Sure, almost all of his movies involve him roundhouse kicking people in the face and battering wave after wave of disposable henchmen, but by seeking inspiration from outside of his native Hong Kong and the kung fu formula, the multi-hyphenate performer carved out a unique niche for himself.
Instead, he spotted a gap in the market, and by channelling the spirit of his two biggest heroes and inspirations, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, he became the first mainstream comedy superstar to balance martial arts and comedy in equal measure, although his death-defying antics obviously helped.
He was the first of his kind; not only was he a performer, fight choreographer, writer, producer, and director, but he’d successfully blended old-school physical comedy with cutting-edge and intricately designed action beats, which saw him emerge as Hong Kong’s biggest movie star in decades.
It wasn’t just Keaton and Chaplin, though, with the Rush Hour favourite also pointing to Gene Kelly as a touchstone, which drove his decision to make his onscreen scraps more balletic and dance-like, while his preference for playing the underdog came from Dustin Hoffman, of all people, because “he’s not tough, but people like him.”
However, any top-billed star from Hong Kong who gained fame in the martial arts arena from the 1970s onward always had to contend with the biggest elephant in the room: Bruce Lee. Plenty of pretenders to the throne have emerged, but as Chan revealed, since he knew he couldn’t compete, he became his own man.
“He influenced me a lot, but I knew I could never be him,” he told the South China Morning Post. “He was the king of martial arts, and I just admired him. The way he talked, the way he punched, even the way he spoke was impressive. He was a really good talker! Because he was born in the US, he was more open than us.”
Two of Chan’s earliest big-screen opportunities came alongside Lee, when he worked as a stuntman in 1972’s Fist of Fury and the following year’s Enter the Dragon. As much as he wanted to follow a similar path to the summit of cinema, he was aware that the iconic star was in a league of his own.
“I would think, ‘Don’t be like that; you may not be better than him, but you are still good,'” he explained. “But Lee was already the top guy. The world was praising Bruce Lee.”
Instead, he developed his own signature style, which worked wonders since everyone with a soft spot for the action genre knows exactly what a Jackie Chan movie looks like.
