The actors Jackie Chan has always wanted to work with: “Before I retire from this business”
No matter the films you watch and enjoy, everyone has heard of Jackie Chan – a legendary stuntman, martial artist and actor known for Rush Hour, The Karate Kid and Enter the Dragon.
Throughout his decades of performances on the silver screen, the actor became known for his slapstick fighting style and extreme action sequences, all of which he performed himself, often seen leaping from buildings and doing back flips in highly inconvenient places. With over 150 films, he is considered one of the most influential performers and martial artists in the history of cinema, inspiring the likes of Tom Cruise and Lucy Liu with their stunt work. However, despite appearing to have done it all, Chan has named the actors he would still love to work with.
Chan began his acting career at the age of five, taking on small roles in films such as Big and Little Wong Tin Bar and Come Drink with Me. In 1971, he was signed with Chu Mu’s Great Earth Film Company, appearing in his first Bruce Lee film, The Fist of Fury, in 1972. The pair became long-time collaborators and worked on multiple projects, such as City Hunter, Game of Death, and Drunken Master.
However, his first breakout role was in the 1978 film Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, with the director giving him the ability to choreograph his own stunt work, becoming one of the formative films within the comedic kung-fu movement. The following year, he starred in Drunken Master, which sky-rocketed him to commercial success and built the foundations for a long and irreplaceable career.
Despite years of performances that developed the backbone of the action genre, Chan still has some things to tick off his bucket list, describing the actors he’d most like to work with. He explained, “I have always hoped to make movies with some people whom I really admire, like Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, before I retire from this business”.
Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro are both equally successful but within very different genres of cinema. After his devastating breakout performance in The Graduate, Hoffman went on to star in Midnight Cowboy, Kramer vs Kramer and Tootsie, establishing himself as a committed method actor despite sometimes going too far with the controversial technique.
Much like Chan’s relationship with Lee, De Niro has established a long creative partnership with Martin Scorsese, collaborating with him on a range of films from Taxi Driver to The Irishman. Both duos show how rewarding it can be to expand on the connection you have with one director, being able to nurture a relationship and allow it to inform your craft. However, neither De Niro nor Hoffman have performed any stunts on the same level as Chan and would most definitely struggle to keep up if cast in an action-packed project with the iconic martial artist.
While the probability of a collaboration between them cannot be ruled out entirely, the likelihood of a film that could play to all of their strengths would surely be hard to come by.
