Jason Statham hated working with co-star Natalya Rudakova: “Some hairdresser off the street”
There’s a slight irony in Jason Statham once deriding a former co-star as “some hairdresser”, and that is two-fold.
Firstly, it’s that before Statham became an actor, he, like most people, had a ‘normal’ profession too. And secondly, it’s that basically every film he is in now is based around some kind of trade: The Beekeeper, The Mechanic, The Transporter. If the next one was The Hairdresser, it would not be unexpected, but thought-provoking due to the visible lack of a crop on his shaved walnut.
At the receiving end of this shade was Russian hairdresser Natalya Rudakova, who caught Luc Besson’s fancy as the perfect female lead for 2008’s Transporter 3. After two successful movies, hopes were high for the third instalment, leading to the Fifth Element director being roped in to produce and co-write. However, for reasons only known to himself, he decided to cast Rudakova, despite her having had no prior acting experience, let alone as one of the captains in a fairly major movie franchise.
Besson paid out of his own pocket for some 25 acting lessons for Rudakova, and perhaps it actually paid off, given Transporter 3 ended up being the most successful of the three, grossing over $110million at the box office. Reviews weren’t brilliant however, and it proved to be the last we saw of the Transporter. Nevertheless, little of the criticism was levelled at Statham, who did many of his own stunts himself and escaped unscathed.
The actor, who said at the time of filming The Mechanic back in 2011 that he was hoping to move more into what he called ‘quality movies’, remained unconvinced at this outcome for the final instalment. Speaking of the casting of Ben Foster (not the former Watford goalkeeper) in the film with him, Statham said, “He’s great. He’s a real quality actor, so for me to be able to work opposite someone like that and not some hairdresser cast off the street, which is what happened with Transporter 3, well, it was fantastic.”
To be fair to Rudakova, it wasn’t a one-off, and she did go on to appear in eight more projects until 2019, after which she hasn’t been heard of much, so maybe she went back to being a hairdresser, who knows.
Statham, meanwhile, who was a diver before he became one of the biggest shiny-headed action stars in the world, continues to pump out his very successful ‘of a type’ movies almost annually. Last year, it was The Beekeeper that proved to be a surprise hit, and a sequel to that is currently in the works.
This year, it was A Working Man, partly written by Sylvester Stallone, the story of, well, a generic working man who, guess what, has to go and rescue a teenage girl who’s been kidnapped by a shadowy gang.
His fans will have to wait a while for his return to the world of Fast and Furious however; Fast X: Part 2 isn’t scheduled to appear in cinemas until as late as 2027, but will see Statham reunited with the likes of The Rock and Vin Diesel. Quite where they go with the franchise that started off as a street racing movie and ended up with people battling each other in space is anybody’s guess.
