Statham digs a little deeper for Safe role
Jason Statham is OK with being called the latest action man of few words. But he draws the line when somebody suggests he’s the new Clint Eastwood.
“You’ve got to be careful about mentioning people as great as Clint Eastwood,” warns Statham at a Soho hotel in Manhattan.
“You can’t put me in the same sentence as that man. If I could have a career 25 per cent as great as him, I’d be very happy. No, I’m just doing what I’m doing, chugging away.”
So far, the chugging has worked out just fine.
The 44-year-old London actor finds himself in some impressive company in The Expendables 2. Opening Aug. 17, the sequel stars Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, JeanClaude Van Damme, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris and Liam Hemsworth.
Safe, in theatres Friday, is all Statham, all the time. He plays Luke Wright, a burned-out former special agent based in New York, who ends up a target of the Russian mob, Asian Triads and crooked Manhattan cops.
This is a consequence of rescuing Mei (Catherine Chan), a genius forced to remember numbers for the Triads.
When Luke realizes her latest memorized sequence is the combination to a safe, he tries to figure out a way to save both her and himself.
Of course, the ultimate solution requires few words and lots of gunfire, mixed-martial arts confrontations, and chases in cars and on a New York subway.
The movie isn’t exactly unfamiliar territory for Statham.
The former Olympic diver has carved out a unique action niche for himself as the loner running amok, starting with 2002’s The Transporter, which led to a sec- ond Transporter in 2005 and a third in 2008.
He also sandwiched in 2006’s Crank and a Crank followup in 2009.
Safe is a slight change for Statham from the likes of Transporter and Crank. He is required to dig a little deeper for his portrayal this time around.
“He’s in a very dark place,” says Statham of Luke. “And I don’t usually get to go there.”
In fact, director Boaz Yakin says he pushed the actor to enter “new emotional territory,” because he knew he was up for it.
“He didn’t reinvent the wheel,” says Yakin of Statham’s performance in Safe. “But he did offer some colours in his character we haven’t seen from him before.”
Meanwhile, Yakin did count on Statham to do much of his own stunt work. The director even asked his star to offer his opinion about the fight choreography.
“I guess I have a sensitive feel for what’s right in the action part of it,” Statham says. “So, yeah, I definitely have a large input in what those sorts of scenes look like.”
The subway car battle, filmed in New York, was one of his favourites. “That was very inventive,” says Statham, smiling. “And it was quite painful for a few of my fellow stuntmen.”
But the stunt guys suffered only minor injuries, says the actor, who has recovered from a few broken bones of his own.
Luckily, he escaped serious injury on The Expendables 2, which wrapped in Bulgaria a few months ago.
Stallone left the directing to Simon West, who worked with Statham on the 2010 remake of the Charles Bronson revenge flick The Mechanic.
Compared to his starring role in Safe, acting in an ensemble cast for the second Expendables was like a quasi-holiday. “God, yeah,” he says. “I mean, with the Expendables 2, you’ve got such a massive, brilliant, bunch of action stars, so I was in it for the ride.”
Plus, he got to know Stallone better, because the Rambo star didn’t have the stress, and time constraints, of double duty as director and actor on the sequel. “He was really chilled out this time.”
Other than that, Statham won’t give much away about The Expendables 2 plot. But he will say the villain is a rival mercenary, who assassinates one of the “expendables,” so the team seeks revenge.
It sounds like another perfect Statham vehicle. “Well, I do like the clarity of good versus evil,” he says. “People can see the clear definition between the two, and it allows the audience to get behind the right people.”
In contrast, the actor made his debut as “a moral inbetweener” in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 cockney-mockney crime caper, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and 2000’s Snatch.
But acting, whether he’s playing a good guy, a bad guy, or something in-between, was never on Statham’s wish list. He was on Britain’s national diving squad, good enough to place 12th at the 1992 World Championships. After retiring from the sport, he turned to modelling to make some money.
A chance encounter with Ritchie, a commercial director transitioning into film, led to his acting debut, and a career he never dreamt he’d have.
“Yeah,” says Statham, smirking. “Guy took me off the streets, and put me in the movies.”