Jackie Chan, who turned 63 this year, holds the Guinness World Record for the most credits on a single movie. (Fifteen jobs, on a movie called CZ12, or Chinese Zodiac, from 2012, starring Jackie Chan, directed by Jackie Chan, gaffed by Jackie Chan, with catering coordinated by Jackie Chan.) But in his new movie, The Foreigner, he's mostly just an actor giving a performance, a surprisingly subtle and nuanced one, as a grief-stricken London restaurateur seeking revenge on a rogue IRA faction after their bomb kills his daughter. Not counting two Kung Fu Panda sequels, The Nut Job 2, and The Lego Ninjago Movie—in which he voices, respectively, a monkey, a surly mouse, and a wise old piece of Lego—The Foreigner will be his first high-profile U.S. release since 2010, when he played Jaden Smith's mentor in a reboot of The Karate Kid, noteworthy for being a movie with "karate" in the title in which the only martial art practiced is kung fu.
He hasn't been idle this decade. Idle is not one of the speeds in Jackie Chan's gearbox. "Sometimes I look at some other actors, famous actors," he says incredulously. "They're so comfortable! After filming, just holiday! With a girlfriend or the family." After filming, Jackie tends to an ever-expanding portfolio of business interests, and then he makes more films. In the time since The Foreigner wrapped, he's already completed a science-fiction thing called Bleeding Steel, which features the first fight scene ever shot on the roof of the Sydney Opera House. But The Foreigner is a different kind of Jackie Chan movie, and a lot of people are excited about it. So today Jackie's driven 30 miles from Beijing to the Panlong Valley to visit his International Stunt Training Base and talk to some foreign visitors about the movie.
His International Stunt Training Base is one building in a giant Tony Stark–ass complex of several, all of which Jackie also owns. His personal logo—JACKIE intertwined with the Chinese character for "dragon"—is on its massive perforated-aluminum facade. Jackie can walk out the front door and stand at the top of the staircase leading to the limestone plaza below, look out at the green hills in the distance, and know for certain that he owns every man-made thing he can see between here and the green hills, including the chapel and the Spanish-style housing development just barely visible over the next rise.
Here, he'll show you around.
Here is an equestrian statue of Jackie Chan, made from what looks at first glance like ordinary rusty metal but turns out to be old camera equipment used on Jackie's films. Look, this klieg light, which illuminated the sets of Jackie Chan movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985)? Now it's part of the horse body. It's a haunch.
Here is this legitimately fucking incredible painting, in the trompe l'oeil style, of Jackie Chan doing kung fu on a narrow rock outcropping on the edge of a dizzyingly deep canyon, and if you stand on this one precise spot on the floor and someone takes your picture, it looks, in the picture, like you too are on the actual edge of the canyon doing kung fu, or whatever you're doing.
Here is a glass atrium with a hexagonal glass booth inside, and in the booth there is a 60-million-year-old tree, pulled out of the ocean off Shanghai not long ago and given to Jackie as a gift. Or maybe it's a 65,000-year-old tree. Honestly, Jackie is a little hard to pin down on the precise age of the tree. But it is almost definitely thousands and thousands of years old, this tree.
The glass inside the prism is moist, and the tree behind the glass is moist and seems almost to be breathing, like it is the ambassador from a planet ruled by sentient driftwood, placed within a warming prism for optimum comfort during its diplomatic visit. If you visit Jackie, he will look at the tree with you. If you ask who gave it to him, he'll say he doesn't remember, that people give him "so many presents."
It seems like it should be hard to forget who gave you a thousand(s)-year-old tree, but nothing is impossible if you are Jackie Chan.
Also, Jackie will give you things if you come to see him. If he sees you admiring it, Jackie will just give you a souvenir coffee-table book containing pictures of every single member past and present of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. The book is a kind of family history of Jackie and the crews of stunt performers who've backed him up in hundreds of films and too many action scenes to count, and also a history of cool-guy haircuts for Asian men between 1976 and the present day.
Just take it. Jackie wants you to have it. It weighs as much as a modest tombstone. Jackie says, "You take," and you don't hear a question mark, because not taking the book is not an option.
"My first impression of him was, we were in Inner Mongolia, and he comes riding up on one of those electric scooters, a Segway scooter, with this beautiful green Chinese military trench coat on," says Johnny Knoxville, who made a movie called Skiptrace with Jackie in various regions of mainland China a year or so ago. "It's a gorgeous jacket. And it's so cold that day. I'm like, 'Oh, that's a wonderful jacket.' He's like, 'You like it? It's yours.' And he just gives me the jacket right off his back. I was like, 'No, I wasn't going for that,' and he's like, 'No. No. Yours.' He gave me two or three jackets on that movie."
Jackie sits in a chair in a private lounge above the main workout room of the training center. Excuse me: Jackie sits in a Louis XV–style armchair upholstered in fabric decorated with black-and-white caricatures of Jackie Chan as a skateboarding waiter in the movie Wheels on Meals and as a proud dog-dad holding his golden retrievers, Jones and J.J., back when they were puppies. There are only four chairs like this in the entire world, and all of them are in this room.
Jackie is wearing a tracksuit with his logo on the left breast. The tracksuit is a vibrant electric blue. Jackie is talking about CGI and how he continues to train young stunt people to do things his way, even as computers make it less and less necessary for stunt performers to put themselves in real danger the way Jackie did for years, even as computers make it possible for any actor to seem like they're doing what Jackie Chan can do.
"The new action star," Jackie is saying, "they don't know how to fight. They can use a special effect, like Spider-Man. Everyone can be Spider-Man."
He gestures toward a woman in the corner of the room.
"She can be a Superwoman. So many doubles. One of my team members [was] Wonder Woman's double. They go, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa"—he mimes a flurry of punches thrown by a double—"then [Gal Gadot] come back, just pretty, just standing here. Ha! Easy."
It was really him up there, getting punched, kicked, thrown through all those windows, hit by all those cars, hanging from that helicopter over Kuala Lumpur. You have never seen another movie star suffer as much cumulative physical pain and place himself in as much danger as Jackie Chan has. The way things are going, you probably never will.
Jackie speaks about five languages rather well, but because he's been working in China so much lately, his English is rustier than usual. Then again, he's always made himself understood through movement. He's been telling stories with his body his entire life.
When he talks about how he came up with a move from one of his iconic fight sequences in a movie called Snake in Eagle's Shadow, his arm becomes a cobra again, like it did the first time he did the move, practicing late one night in a hotel mirror in 1979, the night before he shot the scene.
When Chan says, "I know I'm not young anymore. I cannot continue to make Rush Hour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. How can I continue [to] do this kind of funny face," he pretends to throw a punch and then makes a face like Holy shit, that hurt, because it can hurt to punch somebody, often as much as being punched—a truth about human frailty that Jackie made into a comic trademark, as befits the Tom Hanks of kung fu movies.
If you've lost track of Jackie since the last Rush Hour or so, one thing you need to know is that, as a filmmaker and actor, he's mostly been producing product tailored specifically for the multiplex theaters now proliferating across mainland China—lavish historical action dramas, heavy with patriotic messaging about, like, the importance of repatriating Qing dynasty artifacts and the heroism of ordinary Chinese railroad workers during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Even the nominally Western-looking Skiptrace—the one with Johnny Knoxville as Jackie's reluctant partner, directed by Finnish action auteur Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) from a script by two Americans—was a joint U.S.-Chinese production conceived, Chan says, to showcase China's culture and natural beauty in all their vast variety.
He's bigger than he's ever been, just not in America. Skiptrace, which in all likelihood you have not seen, unless you're a Renny Harlin completist? It cost only $30 million to make and earned over USD 136 million last year, mostly in China.
Another recent Jackie movie called Kung Fu Yoga—the first product of an Indian-Chinese co-production agreement signed in New Delhi in 2014 by India's minister of Information and Broadcasting and China's director of State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, because that is the kind of United Nations shit that precedes the green-lighting of a Jackie Chan movie now—opened and closed in the United States within four weeks and made $362,657. In China, it made $254 million.
As of 2017, according to Forbes, Jackie was the world's 39th-highest-paid entertainer, which puts him behind Beyoncé, LeBron James, and The Rock but ahead of Kim Kardashian, Tom Cruise, and Taylor Swift.
He now has a sprawling portfolio of business interests outside the movie industry, particularly mainland-China brand-ambassador partnerships brokered through the Hong Kong–based luxury-goods importer Sparkle Roll Holdings. Around 2010, he moved his operations from Hong Kong to Beijing. Also, after years of not having been a publicly political guy in any way, the newly wealthy Jackie has become vocally and sometimes vociferously pro-China.
People say Jackie became a patriot when he got rich, or got rich because he was so willing to become a patriot. Either way, it's cost him some fans back in Hong Kong, the city of his birth. So have remarks like the ones he made in 2012, when he referred to Hong Kong as a chaotic "city of protest marches" and suggested that more stringent public-demonstration laws might help make the city great again. It wasn't the first time he'd said stuff like this, nor the last.
On one level, The Foreigner, which also stars Pierce Brosnan as a sexy, compromised Gerry Adams analogue, is a pure product of a new vertically integrated moment in Jackie's career. It was financed by Jackie and his friends at the media division of Sparkle Roll, the Chinese conglomerate Huyai Brothers Media, and STX Entertainment, the private-equity-incubated Hollywood media start-up that brought you Bad Moms.
But it's also the first must-see Jackie movie in years, a gray-lion action movie in the Taken mold, a film that builds on the fact that Jackie is not as young as he used to be, instead of pretending it's not obvious. Director Martin Campbell—best known for bridging the Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras of the James Bond franchise—keeps the action sequences fast, lean, and brutal. But like the original Taken, in which Liam Neeson's aura of lived-in sorrow elevated a fantasy about cathartic revenge and masculine über-competence, this is a movie with an actual performance at its center, one that may surprise even the biggest Chan stans.
Beginning in the late '70s, Jackie made a string of hugely successful Chinese-language action comedies in which he borrowed shamelessly from Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, injecting the solemn martial-arts-movie formula with visual wit and suicidal daring. In the best films he made between 1978's Drunken Master (under the influence, lazy goof becomes virtuoso fighter) and 1985's Police Story (modern-day Jackie as a modern-day cop, part one of a franchise), what you're watching is one of the most brilliant physical comedians in the history of movies entering world cinema through the side door of genre (or, this being Jackie, the second-floor window).
But he hasn't done a lot of capital-A acting. He tends to play the same guy over and over, a regular dude caught up in insane circumstances, as surprised to find himself doing crazy daredevil shit as you or I would be. Like a lot of true movie stars, he's always seemed nervous about turning off the charm. Even when he staggers into an alley to puke up scotch as a tormented cop in 2004's uncharacteristically gritty New Police Story, there's something Chaplin-esque about the wobble in his legs.
The Foreigner does build to a pretty incredible close-quarters fist-and-gun fight in which Jackie, as the broken-man protagonist Mr. Quan, is seen kicking ass and weaponizing household objects like Fred Astaire dancing with a hat rack. But the movie takes quite a while to get there, and in that time a surprisingly dialed-down and vulnerable Jackie delivers a keenly affecting performance as a parent who has lost a child and knows he can't get her back no matter how many IRA goons he takes out with MacGyver-esque IEDs and punji sticks and his own bloody knuckles.
Campbell says he was a Jackie fan from way back, but he had never considered Jackie for The Foreigner, until he watched The Karate Kid.
"There's a marvelous scene where [Jackie's character] destroys this car," Campbell says. "I think it was a car crash that killed his family, and he survived, and every year he reconstructs and remodels this car to perfect condition, and on the day of their death he smashes it with a sledgehammer, as a kind of wailing wall, as it were. He's excellent in that film. That really was the clue for me that he could do this."
"If I'm [to] continue on in the film industry," Jackie says, "I have to change. Otherwise, you gone. You see—in Japan. Korea. America. China. Hong Kong. How many action star all gone? Only few can stay. Stallone's different. He's a legend. Other action stars already gone.
"So that's why I'm looking for different script, different character, different Jackie Chan. I want the audience look at Jackie Chan as an actor. Not the action star. Actor who can fight. Look at Clint Eastwood. If he continue to 'Make my day'? Gone. So he change to directing. He change some other things. Look at Al Pacino. Robert De Niro. I wanna be an Asian Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino.
"I want the movie not just finished, released, gone," Jackie says. "I want the movie 20 years later—right now, you still see Titanic. Wow! So good! Twenty years later, Avatar, still good. I don't want to make a movie, boom, finish, release one month, gone.
"The Sound of Music," Jackie Chan says. "So good!"
Jackie's first real American hit was Rumble in the Bronx, in 1995. It featured Jackie speaking English, a predominantly Western cast, and an extraordinary hovercraft chase. It was filmed in Vancouver, and there are a few shots in which the snowcapped mountains of the Bronx are clearly visible in the background.
New Line Cinema picked up the American rights to Rumble for $5 million and gave it the tagline "No fear, no stuntman, no equal"; it made $32 million and became the first Hong Kong movie ever to top the U.S. box-office charts. New Line picked up a few more of his Chinese movies and re-released them, as did Miramax. They did okay, for Americanized versions of films his cultists had already seen. One of those cultists thought he could improve on that.
Brett Ratner was a 27-year-old music-video director with exactly one feature film to his credit, but he was also a Jackie Chan fanatic. He wanted to put Jackie in an edgy urban buddy-cop movie, one that would place him on equal footing with an American star instead of making him a sidekick, one where Jackie would wear a black suit and look cool. He found out Jackie was filming a movie in South Africa.
"I got on a plane," says Ratner, calling from a treadmill, "and flew 22 hours to have lunch with him. We get to the restaurant. It's a Chinese restaurant in South Africa. So weird. And he feeds me abalone. It was like a piece of rubber. And I'm chewing it and spitting it in my napkin.
"Then he gives me a glass of wine," says Ratner, who doesn't drink or smoke, "and I have to pretend like I'm drinking it. Then he's like, Let's smoke a cigar, and I'm like, Is this guy testing me? What the hell? All the things I don't do."
Ratner pitched Jackie, and Jackie listened, and didn't say yes or no, and then he drove Ratner back to the airport. A few days later Ratner got word that Jackie was in. Not long after that Jackie flew to Los Angeles so that Ratner could introduce him to his future co-star, Chris Tucker.
"They had a conversation for 30 minutes," Ratner says. "I love you Jackie Chan! You the man! And [Jackie] was all, Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you again. Halfway through, Chris says, Brett, can we talk outside for a minute? and I go, Yeah.
"And we go outside, and Chris says, Brett, Jackie Chan don't speak English! How we gon' do a movie when he don't speak English? I said, Oh, it'll be fine. Anyway. We go back in. Chris leaves. I said, Jackie, how did you like Chris? And Jackie says, I like Chris, but I don't understand how he talks. I said to myself, This is going to be fucking genius."
Rush Hour grossed more than $140 million—it was the seventh-biggest movie of 1998, outperforming the likes of Godzilla and Deep Impact—and spawned a franchise that has so far generated more than $800 million. But it didn't really lead Jackie to great roles in good movies. In the years that followed, Hollywood basically treated him like a kids'-menu item in dreck like Around the World in 80 Days and The Spy Next Door and The Tuxedo. Rush Hour bought him a $3 million house in Beverly Hills—right down the street from Harold Lloyd's old place—and he was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2016, but he's never really been challenged and protected by an American director in quite the same way.
"Jackie has, in my opinion, gotten exploited, in a way," Ratner says. "He started doing these movies where they were making him look like a fucking buffoon. And he went for it and he made some bad choices."
That said, Ratner adds: "I just saw the new movie"—The Foreigner—"and I thought he was brilliant in it. I always said he's a real actor. But he never got his opportunity, and I think with this new film, there's some people who are going to be surprised."
Pierce Brosnan calls from Hawaii, having just finished spearfishing, which is the most Pierce Brosnan–ish way to begin a phone call. Brosnan says Jackie acquitted himself brilliantly on the set every day, but that they never really got to know each other, because at the end of the day Jackie would hop on his jet and go home.
"I remember there were waste-disposal garbage cans on the set that were collapsible, and he just fell in love with them. He'd buy 50 of them," Brosnan says. "Really. Or on the craft service, there were these tables, and he liked the way the tables were made, so he'd buy, y'know, 12 of those, and ship them all back to China. Quite extraordinary."
This is the best anecdote Pierce Brosnan has to share, and they made an entire movie together. There were dinners scheduled, Brosnan says, but they fell through, which means that Pierce Brosnan never actually had dinner with Jackie Chan.
But I did, and what I can tell you is that if Jackie Chan invites you to his restaurant, you should go. He owns a fine-dining traditional-Chinese restaurant located near the city center of Beijing, in what was once a three-story Burberry store. Everyone who comes from out of town to visit him at the International Stunt Training Base is invited to dinner with him and his stunt team.
If Jackie Chan invites you to dinner and it takes longer for the rest of the dinner guests to arrive, you might get to sit with him beforehand in a private antechamber, and he might pull out his laptop and show you some things.
Here are some concept illustrations for some new products he wants to introduce—some kind of new take on the plastic bottle that he says Will Smith is interested in partnering with him on, modular coffee stands made of reclaimed wood and metal, so many patent applications and business ideas you will start to wish you'd brought along a prospectus for him to review.
Here are some videos. First a YouTube-style supercut of his gnarliest injuries. Then a kind of infomercial for Jackie Chan, chronicling his philanthropic efforts around the world, which begins as a somewhat uncomfortable thing to sit through in the presence of its subject and eventually floods and disables whatever part of your brain controls the cynicism response, because holy shit this guy does a lot of nice things for people, especially children.
Here's Jackie detonating land mines in Cambodia (sadly, not with his bare hands). Here's Jackie hanging out with tsunami survivors and New York City schoolkids who witnessed 9/11. Here's Jackie getting off the plane he chartered so he could fly to China's Qinghai province and comfort survivors of the 2010 Yushu earthquake. Here's Jackie donating coats to the elderly. It all starts to blur together—so many oversize checks, so many shots of Jackie high-fiving fans, the testimonials from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Zhang Yimou and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Owen Wilson and Sly Stallone.
Jackie also sings the theme song for this video, and at some point during the screening he pulls a Bluetooth speaker out of his bag and pairs it with his laptop, so we can hear his voice more clearly.
Here is Jackie, giving his time and money from Holland to Rwanda to East Timor. Here, for some reason, is Lionel Richie.
There is also a good chance that if you get to talk to Jackie in a context like this, he will talk shit about Hong Kong without even really being prompted to do so.
At one point in this conversation, Jackie tells a long and difficult-to-summarize story about how and why he came to own eight almost 400-year-old sandalwood houses from China's Anhui province. It begins many years ago, with Jackie deciding to buy a nearly 400-year-old sandalwood house, which he planned to disassemble and rebuild in Hong Kong for his aging father (who died in 2008) to live in.
Once he and his father realize that these houses, lacking air-conditioning and indoor plumbing, aren't exactly what a modern person would consider livable, Jackie decides he wants to donate what is now his collection of almost 400-year-old sandalwood houses—because of course in the meantime he's acquired seven additional nearly 400-year-old sandalwood houses, plus a pavilion and an opera stage—to the city of Hong Kong, as a historical attraction. But the fire department gives him a hard time and the politicians give him a hard time, and the story ends with Jackie donating his houses to a university in Singapore instead. The moral seems to be that Jackie had to leave Hong Kong, because Hong Kong drove him away by being a city run by jerks.
"In Hong Kong," Jackie says, "everybody know Jackie Chan. Everybody friend. But they know money, more than friend. In China, money nothing. Friend, important. They so rich in China, they say, Jackie Chan, you move in, free. I just use your name—Jackie Chan movie theater, Jackie Chan restaurant. I pay you. In Hong Kong, I know a lot of rich people—Yeah, Jackie, come on, open some restaurant—but the rental very expensive."
You can ask if it makes him feel sad, this situation, the perception in his old hometown that their hero has turned heel, and he will answer a different question.
"A lot of people ask, 'Somebody screw you on the Internet. Are you angry?' I say no. Me? So happy. If 7 billion people didn't like me, that's a problem. I must change. If only 1 million people don't like you? It's okay."
His stuntmen have arrived and arrayed themselves around a big round table. Dinner is served. Jackie does not stop moving. He ladles food onto his guests' plates, pours wine, pops up to fetch carafes of Moutai, a lethally potent clear liquor distilled from fermented sorghum. It's Jackie's own signature Moutai, produced as a tie-in product with Dragon Blade, a 2015 Jackie movie about Romans on the Silk Road that for reasons unexplained by Chinese or Roman history co-starred John Cusack.
He will give you a bottle of it. You don't even have to ask.
If you are invited to dinner at Jackie Chan's restaurant, you will be warned that he doesn't like to be interviewed while he eats, and that at some point he will rap his fists on the table, which indicates that the meal is over, and no one will linger long after that. At some point when you have all had a Moutai or two, perhaps he will get a little mellow, a little free-associative, and the table talk will go quiet so that people can listen to him speak.
He will talk about the ten years of Dickensian privation he endured as a ward of the China Drama Academy, where he learned the skills required to perform Peking opera—acting, singing, tumbling, stage combat, the roots of what he does in movies to this day—and also how to take a caning.
"You get up five o'clock in the morning. Training until five o'clock. We would never take off the shoes. You don't have time to take off the shoes. Tough training. Very tough. Hours—a thousand punch, 500 kick. Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa. Turn-around kick, hundred. Left side, hundred."
He was one of hundreds. All these boys and girls at the drama school. A few of them went on to be movie actors like he did. But only Jackie has a hundred films. Only Jackie has private jets with his name on the tail. A restaurant. All this. If you bring this up to Jackie at the right moment, he will allow himself to marvel at it, for a minute or two.
"Sometimes I look back myself. It really is a miracle," Jackie says. "So many people work very hard. Why I just come out? Lucky, yes. It's not just lucky. I work very hard, when I was young. Everybody sleeping, I still watch the mirror, to do a drunken style."
Then he pounds the table in rhythm and his stuntmen join him in pounding the table, and with that the meal is concluded.
Alex Pappademas also has the body of a vital 63-year-old man.
This story originally appeared in the October 2017 issue with the title "Still Kicking."
