Jackie with his charges at the International Stunt Training Base. Almost all of these people have been beaten up by Jackie in a movie at some point.
Jackie Chan’s Plan to Keep Kicking Forever
Photo of Alex Pappademas
BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLES SABRIÉ
21 hours ago
Jackie Chan is in his 60s now. His stunts aren’t as insane as they once were, but he’s back on American screens with a killer new revenge flick called The Foreigner (Jackie vs. evil James Bond!). So GQ sent Alex Pappademas to Beijing to interview the king in his castle—a vast martial-arts complex as awesome and over-the-top as Jackie Chan himself.
JUDSON BAKER/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES
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 ****ing 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 spars with a wooden staff while another guy does flips in the background. This place is awesome.
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."
Originally Posted by Baqualin
Very well said Lok....When I was young the only racism I experienced was the typical B & W thing...never understood it, because I grew up a farm boy and worked for a couple of Black farmers (best cooks at lunch time!) and in the field together for other farmers...it always made me feel horrible when all these same people I worked side by side with, laughed with and ate with were ridiculed and mistreated at school for no reason....I got in a few fights because of this. Then at college (where there's a melting pot) I saw that it wasn't just a Black & White thing.....at a party a Black friend & I were talking when we looked around to see everyone one had left the room....the girls having the party had invited a few Middle easterners (using that term as not to insult particulars) they left the room and were outside acting all ****ed off and refusing to come in the same room with a Black man....I was like WTF.....I became aware that racism is not just an American B&W thing...it's everywhere (even with animals), my master who is Chinese even said that the Chinese feel they are the superior race.....DON'T WE ALL! I see it everywhere I go now.....everybody wants their own kind to be the best.....still a lot of evolving to do.....at least we can talk about it here without killing each other (well some of us).
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