“We paid everyone poorly”: the iconic Bruce Lee reunion that Chuck Norris turned down
He’s been more meme than man for the better part of the last two decades, even though there’s an entire generation out there who can’t remember when Chuck Norris jokes were the biggest thing on the internet, but there used to be a time when he went to great lengths to be taken seriously.
Not as an actor, right enough, because he’s always been rubbish at that. As popular as he became in the 1980s for his bearded adventures, where he’d single-handedly decimate a small army of henchmen without breaking a sweat, nobody would ever say with any degree of confidence that Norris could emote his way out of a wet paper bag without suffocating.
However, when it came to roundhouse kicking people in the face, he had few peers. A martial artist by trade, he owed his film career to the legendary Bruce Lee. Much like his soon-to-be close friend, Norris also trained actors and celebrities in hand-to-hand combat, which led directly to his screen debut in 1968’s The Wrecking Crew.
As Lee’s star continued to rise and he became the martial arts genre’s first global cinematic superstar, he extended his buddy and occasional training partner an invitation to play Colt in 1972’s The Way of the Dragon. It was Norris’ first movie in four years and only his second overall, but he was quickly bitten by the bug and became an almost annual fixture on the silver screen in the years to come.
The illicit brawl between them while shooting the picture has become ingrained in both men’s urban legends and mythology, but when the opportunity arose for them to reunite onscreen and kick each other’s asses in a decidedly more legal and industry-approved setting, Norris baulked.
As often tends to be the case with actors who pride themselves on being the manliest of men in front of and away from the cameras, the noted denim enthusiast wasn’t impressed when he discovered that if he agreed to play O’Hara, the bodyguard of Shih Kien’s Han, in Enter the Dragon, he’d come out on the losing sight of a fight against Lee for the second consecutive film.
There were also financial considerations, after producer Fred Weintraub admitted that “we paid everyone poorly,” with the obvious exception of the leading man, who ended up earning millions. Norris wasn’t sold on the prospect of having his ass handed to him again, especially when he had eyes on an above-the-title career of his own, so he rejected the offer.
That caused Lee to resort to blackmail, with the icon issuing an ultimatum: “If you don’t take this part, I’m going to give it to Bob Wall.” It was an attempt to get under Norris’ skin, with Wall another well-known name on the American and international martial arts circuit who also fancied himself as a bit of an actor.
He wouldn’t change his mind, though, leaving the man who vowed to beat Steven Seagal to death taking the part of O’Hara in Enter the Dragon, while Norris’ only contribution to cinema in 1973 was a cameo appearance in the exploitation flick The Student Teachers.
