The only times Chuck Norris has played the villain
His surge in popularity at the beginning of the 21st century may have largely been reliant on memes and parody, but it seemed as though Chuck Norris was destined to end up as an actor in one way or another.
In the late 1960s, when he was still competing in karate tournaments – a profession from which he retired undefeated – Norris befriended Bruce Lee, who was then starring as Kato in The Green Hornet but was right on the cusp of becoming the most iconic star in the history of mainstream martial arts cinema.
He was encouraged to get into acting in the first place by Steve McQueen, with the two having formed a close bond when the actor became a regular fixture at one of the many karate studios he owned and operated at the time. Soon enough, Norris had taken up acting classes and got his first major break in Lee’s 1972 hit The Way of the Dragon.
The martial arts genre had started to taper off in popularity by the end of the decade, though, but the 1980s proved to be the ideal time for a trained fighter and military veteran with a penchant for double denim to begin rising to the top of the industry. Once indestructible action heroes who handily dispatched small armies of disposal foreign goons with the greatest ease became irresistible to audiences, Norris experienced a massive uptick in recognition and fame.
Hardly the most naturally skilled of thespians, it didn’t really matter when all people wanted to see from Norris and his star vehicles with such inspiring titles as A Force of One, An Eye for an Eye, Silent Rage, Forced Vengeance, Missing in Action, Code of Silence, and The Delta Force was good old-fashioned jingoistic ass-kicking, which he could always be relied upon to deliver.
Breaking bad was never of any interest to him, handily explained and underlined by the fact on just two occasions did he ever play a villain, and both of them came in his first two prominent on-screen parts. In addition to antagonizing Lee in The Way of the Dragon, he took a trip to the dark side in 1974’s Yellow Faced Tiger, which was released in the United States as the more palatable but eminently descriptive Slaughter in San Francisco.
Reflecting on the decidedly against-type role, Norris recalled to Empire how he “played a drug lord who smokes a cigar and tries to rape his brother’s girlfriend.” It may have taken seven years following a local release in 1974 to make it Stateside, but he still remembered how “it wasn’t supposed to play outside of China.”
For the next 40 years, never again would Norris even entertain the idea of on-screen malevolence, having gotten it out of his system early and then deciding it wasn’t for him.
