Al Leong: cinema’s greatest-ever disposable henchman
The disposable henchman is one of the most thankless jobs in all of cinema, with a cavalcade of stunt performers lining up to be mowed down, blown up, decimated, and obliterated by the hero. Every action flick needs them, but Al Leong might be the only one to have leveraged so much death into cult hero status.
The people that tend to make waves in the action arena are the stars, whether it’s the musclebound beefcakes of the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone era, the influential martial arts stylings of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, or the more relatable everymen cut from the Bruce Willis and Keanu Reeves cloth.
Leong has worked with many of them, but he became an entity unto himself, to the point it doesn’t feel like any actioner is really deserving of classic status unless he’s appeared in it. With his signature moustache and long hair, he’s popped up in a mind-boggling array of all-timers in a variety of guises, with the common denominator being that he doesn’t stand a chance of making it to the end credits.
Who derives great pleasure in torturing Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs in the timeless buddy cop trailblazer Lethal Weapon? Who steals a scene in Die Hard without saying a word by pilfering sweets ahead of a showdown with the authorities encroaching upon the Nakatomi Plaza? Who gets an ice cream cone through the back of the head in Schwarzenegger’s underappreciated cult favourite Last Action Hero?
The answer to all of the above—and many more besides—is Leong, of course. A favourite of John Carpenter, Leong dazzled wielding machetes in Big Trouble in Little China before reuniting with the filmmaker on They Live and Escape from LA. He played Genghis Khan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, an assassin in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, and was even gunned down by Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24.
The cult of Leong grew so strong that his scenes were cut from Lethal Weapon 4 based entirely on how well-known he’d become as a secondary antagonist in the original because there were not exactly a huge amount of stunt performers and background players carrying off the moustache-and-mullet combo who ended up taking on a life of their own to become widely beloved fixtures of the action circuit.
It’s a status he’s embraced with open arms, although Leong did self-deprecatingly suggest that it was his abilities to convincingly pop his clogs that kept him gainfully employed for so long. “I think I am hired to die because they’ve seen me on another show and said, ‘We want to bring this guy in / I like the way this guy dies,'” he suggested to Dazed, which does have a fair bit of truth to it.
On the other hand, how many faceless henchmen or disposable goons can even the most ardent of action cinema devotees name by heart? It’s an incredibly slim list, if there’s even a list at all. Should there be such a thing as that list, then there can’t be many more names on it than Leong.
All the man had to do was show up and be killed over and over again, but he ended up becoming an integral part of so many classic films because of that innate ability to stand out as part of a crowd who existed expressly to meet their demise.
