ART OF ACTION
Actor Jason Statham opens up on film success
“I’m not a classically trained actor,” Jason Statham said. “I haven’t spent decades working on my craft. I don’t even use words like ‘my craft.’ I’m the guy who used to pinch jewellery on the street, and not some thespian who can chameleon into every single role.
“You could say I was plucked from obscurity and landed in the movie industry.”
Given that, he’s not doing badly. The 51-yearold Brit is one of Hollywood’s top action stars, and will team with another — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, now in cinemas.
Don’t look to see Statham pushing the envelope, strutting his stuff in a romantic comedy or a costume drama. As another action star once remarked, a man’s got to know his limitations.
“At the end of the day, no one is clamouring to cast me as that sweet and sensitive veterinarian who falls in love and quotes poetry,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not sure I’d even want to do that onscreen, mate. We might be a whole lot safer with my body dangling from a truck that’s about to fly off a cliff. That’s what I know how to do.” Statham goes 100% action hero for Hobbs & Shaw, a film that reunites him with big-screen buddy Johnson in roles that they originated in sequels to The Fast And The Furious (2001).
The new film stars Johnson as lawman Luke Hobbs and Statham as reformed assassin Deckard Shaw. The two are forced to form an unlikely alliance when a cyber-genetically enhanced villain named Brixton (Idris Elba) threatens the future of humanity.
Their big-screen pairing was virtually a no-brainer.
“We had done a couple of films in the Fast & Furious universe before this one,” Statham said. “In those past films we really enjoyed giving each other a tough time, plus Dwayne and I became good friends off-screen. We thought, if we could do a little bit more of that and have a good time doing it, then why not?”
The challenge was making a Fast And Furious film without all the characters audiences have come to expect from that world.
“This is Hobbs & Shaw,” Statham said, “so there are a lot of Fast And Furious regulars you won’t see, which is fine because it’s a different movie. At the same time, we have the utmost respect for the originating universe. We kept our eyes on the DNA of that first universe and tried very carefully to maintain what was so special about it.”
The idea to spin off Hobbs and Shaw was an obvious one after they appeared together, sparring and bantering, in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), Furious 7 (2015) and The Fate Of The Furious (2017).
“There was just this great chemistry between myself and Jason,” Johnson said in a separate interview. “We knew we needed to create something together that would be big and bombastic.