How Jason Statham almost chased an Oscar winner out of cinema: “No, this is terrible”
Unless something drastic changes, like hell freezing over, Jason Statham will never find himself competing for Academy Awards and major acting prizes, not that he’s ever said he’s remotely interested.
He has worked with a few Oscar winners, though, both before and after they took the stage in front of their peers to collect one of the industry’s most prestigious prizes. Brad Pitt hadn’t won either of his when they worked together on Snatch, but Robert De Niro had when they partnered up on Killer Elite.
Statham is very good at what he does, even if what he does is fairly niche, making mid-budget action thrillers where he plays an incredibly Jason Stathamy character, which he freshens up every now and again by appearing in big-budget ensemble blockbusters where he plays an incredibly Jason Stathamy character.
It isn’t for everyone, though, and it even convinced an actor widely lauded as one of their generation’s finest that maybe they’d be better off without trying to crack the movie business. Not every thespian is destined for the silver screen, but if you were to ask 100 people to name the best stage performers of the last four decades, the list isn’t worth the paper it’s written on unless Mark Rylance is on it.
The two-time Olivier Award and three-time Tony winner mastered treading the boards long before he made a concerted push toward films, and it almost didn’t happen after he became so disillusioned playing a supporting role in Statham’s run-of-the-mill 2011 effort, Blitz, that he sacked his representatives and decided movies weren’t for him after all.
“I gave up film acting around 2010 when I was in a horrible film called Blitz,” he explained to The Independent. “I so hated it that I got rid of all my agents.” Statham didn’t personally turn up with a pitchfork and chase him out of Hollywood, but playing a bit part in one of the leading man’s archetypal vehicles left him so put out that he was adamant he never wanted to be in another picture.
“Eventually, I gave it up,” Rylance said, doubling down on his disdain. “I did this film I hated being a part of called Blitz. I thought: ‘No, this is terrible, I am done with this.'” He wasn’t out of the game for long, and having returned to the stage the following year for a run of Twelfth Night at London’s Apollo Theatre, some guy called Steven Spielberg came along to catch a show.
Rylance was ultimately cast in the director’s Bridge of Spies, which won him the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, quite the turnaround from where he’d been several years previously, when the abject misery he endured shooting Blitz left him convinced that he’d washed his hands of feature-length storytelling for good.
However, there’s a hint of Rylance throwing stones in glass houses. What was his last role in a movie before his Oscar-winning turn as Rudolf Abel? The Gunman, an action thriller helmed by Pierre Morel, who started his career as the cinematographer on The Transporter, Statham’s breakout action flick. Blitz isn’t a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still a damned sight better than Sean Penn’s woeful vanity project.
