ARMED AND READY
Five days a week, for three hours a day, the Mortal Kombat star hits the gym to sweat hard, sharpen his skills – and build a fighter’s body
Lewis Tan sends a flying knee strike into the sweet spot of a kick pad. On impact, the pad pops, like a firework. It’s an image (and a sound) right out of an 80s action movie – and it’s even more impressive since Tan’s running on nothing but black coffee and the few hours of sleep he got while flying home to Los Angeles from his training camp in Thailand.
He’s at LA’s Unbreakable Performance gym on this Sunday morning. And after a 15-minute warm-up, the 36-year-old actor has found his flow, delivering combo after combo of martial-arts moves. Five days a week, three hours a day, he does workouts like this. Each session helps him relieve stress and stay strong – but it’s about more than that. Tan believes his combat is art, and he wants you to see that in the way he moves and fights in any role he takes on. ‘It’s not just violent. It’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘With every single movement [my opponent makes], my response is the purest, most truthful that I can be in that moment. It’s my character doing [that action], and the emotion that I’m going through is there in the action, in the choreography.’
You see it in nearly all of Tan’s performances, from his star turn as Cole Young in 2021’s Mortal Kombat to his latest role, as the sword-wielding giant Tolya in season two of Netflix’s Shadow And Bone, which dropped in mid-March. Tan decided to layer on a few kilos of upper-body muscle for the part, while still maintaining his trademark fighting agility. Because he wants to balance action and emotion, he always does his own stunts.
‘I’m proud of that,’ he says. ‘It’s something that’s part of my family’s legacy. I grew up around the stunt industry my whole life.’
Tan is the son of Philip Tan, a long-time martial artist and stunt coordinator who’s acted or done stunts in a host of TV shows and movies, including last year’s Bullet Train. Tan grew up watching martial-arts films with his father, and later he’d accompany Philip to movie sets. ‘I remember watching these guys do mindblowing gymnastics and martial arts,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was incredible.’
He zips up a weight vest, then turns to his trainer, Arnold Chon, a stunt performer, fight choreographer and five-time world-champion martial artist, who’s holding a pair of pool noodles. Tan assumes a fighter’s
‘I’m proud to do my own stunts – it’s part of my family’s legacy’
stance, then delivers a kick to one of the noodles. Chon nods in satisfaction. The session is full of hitting, as Tan punches and kicks mitts, heavy bags, those pool noodles and paddles. And each piece of gear offers him a new challenge.
He must elude the pool noodles (while in that weighted vest), honing his agility. The heavy bag lets him deliver hits with power. And the paddles give him a chance to chain together eye-catching punch-and-kick combos that seem right out of the MCU. Later, to sharpen his kicking technique, Tan puts on a pair of harness shorts, the kind that often attach to wire rigging on movie sets for flying stunts. Chon connects resistance bands to the shorts, fastening the other ends to a pulley. Then he makes Tan throw a series of kicks. The bands force Tan to deliver extra-explosive thwacks with every rep – and after a single set, he’s out of breath.
But there’s still more work to be done. Every session ends with Tan hitting the weights, building the muscle he needs to play Tolya. Today, that means sets of pull-ups in a weighted vest, which will rock his lats and forearms.
He smiles as he reaches the bar. Tan doesn’t mind one bit, because all this work leaves him ready to do any stunt any director can dream up. ‘That’s something that I want to bring to all my roles,’ he says. ‘It’s not to be cocky. It’s about carrying on a legacy that’s dying.’