Baby oil, busting moves, and leopard-print pants: Jason Statham’s most unsettling performance
There’s at least one generation of moviegoers who know him exclusively for roundhouse kicking people in the face in an endless sea of mid-budget action flicks, which makes it easy to forget that Jason Statham had lived an interesting life before he made it to Hollywood.
Before he’d even made his big-screen debut in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Statham had picked up an eclectic few paper routes, including spending a dozen years as part of the UK’s National Swimming Squad, where he competed as a high-diver at the 1990 Commonwealth Games.
By that time, he was already perfecting the techniques that would make him the scourge of many faceless goons by honing his martial arts, complementing his income by working the market stalls in London, where some of the goods he sold may or may not have been illicitly obtained, depending on who you ask.
He also worked as a model, but once he was bitten by the acting bug, that was that. His early credits seemed to predict that he’d be typecast as a smart-talking geezer in a string of British crime movies, but thanks to Luc Besson’s The Transporter, an entire subgenre was invented, one that’s still going strong a quarter of a century later.
When you see Statham’s name attached to a project, you can probably guess what it is; he’ll play a current or former member of law enforcement or the military who gets drawn into conflict to protect someone at risk from harm, beating the shit out of everyone in his path in pictures that very rarely have titles that extend beyond two words in length.
However, back in the early 1990s, he dabbled in the music industry. We say ‘dabbled’ because he was a background performer in Erasure’s video for ‘Run to the Sun’ and The Beautiful South’s ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ promo, but none of them were as fucking weird as The Shamen’s ‘Comin’ On’.
Little did the now-defunct Scottish purveyors of psychedelic electronica know at the time, but they recruited a future movie star to perform the unenviable task of dancing around like a fucking idiot in the background of their music video, all while slathered head-to-toe in baby oil and sporting nothing but a pair of leopard-print budgie smugglers.
For an alarming percentage of the nearly four-minute clip, a gigantic Statham is superimposed against the background, in what we can only imagine is the sort of hellish imagery that every henchman he’s ever encountered in his film career has nightmares about when they know he’s coming to kill them.
Reflecting on his days as an oily buster of moves, the star summed it up: “You do what you have to do to pay the rent.” That’s true, and everyone has bills, but not many of them have stripped down, lubed up, and paraded around like a ten-pint uncle at a family wedding to avoid an eviction notice, so fair fucks.
