The five actors who shaped Jason Statham’s career: “They had a bit of a laid-back coolness”
There’s a bit of a running joke in the movie industry about Jason Statham: essentially, every film he does is pretty much the same. It involves him taking up a trade, like a mechanic, or a beekeeper or a construction worker, and then instead of actually doing that job, he goes off and kills a lot of people in quite spectacular ways.
Although there’s an element of truth to this, in reality, Statham has made a lot of different movies, and a lot of them have been very good indeed. Crank is one example of this; Transporter 2 is another. And, regardless, even when Statham does do his ‘every day guy doing some plumbing in suburbia turns out to be a deadly assassin’ stuff, he tends to do it better than pretty much anyone else.
We first saw Statham some 25 years ago now in Snatch, Guy Ritchie’s 2000 follow-up to the wildly successful Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that forced Brad Pitt to do a strange Irish accent and led a nation of movie goers to ask each other “Do you like degs?” Statham stood out in the film even among movie royalty like Benicio del Toro, and it was enough to get him the lead role in the Luc Besson-scripted The Transporter a couple of years later.
That was something of an action-packed hit and spawned two sequels, earning Statham head billing in a string of martial-arts-cum-action thrillers, including a face-off with Jet Li in War and a place in The Expendables alongside the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Dolph Lundgren in 2010.
Since then, via some fantastic, self-parodying turns in the likes of Spy with Melissa McCarthy, the actor has become a true action movie legend, delivering films he knows his audience (and it’s a sizeable one) will enjoy, time and again.
This year’s effort is A Working Man, in which every Statham trope is present and correct; a former Royal Marine turned construction worker has to rescue a kidnapped kid from a bunch of villains, and chaos ensues. It also has the requisite disparity in reviews from the critics (not great) and the movie-going public (loved it).
Statham himself knows what his job is now: it’s to be an iconic, all-action movie hero, allowing people to escape and just sit back to enjoy some good, honest entertainment for 90 minutes. It’s a lost art, and he is now the focal point of it, certainly when it comes to smashing bad guys in the face on the big screen.
As for his own influences, perhaps not surprisingly, he turns to those similarly iconic movie men, highlighting the actors that young boys like Statham would have grown up watching in classic ’80s action flicks. He says, “There’s Bruce Lee and then, of course, there’s Sly. Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood. It’s funny, most of my onscreen heroes are sort of the ones of yesteryear. I just thought they had a bit of a laid-back coolness to them.”
Statham has now had Sly Stallone himself write two movies for him to star in, quite the compliment from one of your heroes, and he acknowledges this, saying, “If I could get 5–10% of what he had for a career and what he has done for the film industry, I’d be over the moon. I mean, he’s an exception, the Oscars for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ for Rocky! Someone who wrote something for himself, who is a real class-A filmmaker, class-A screenwriter, just handed a project over to me. That was a great moment in my career.”
That career, despite what some of the critics may say, continues to be a fine one.
The five actors who shaped Jason Statham’s career:
- Bruce Lee
- Sylvester Stallone
- Paul Newman
- Steve McQueen
- Clint Eastwood
