Statham ready for his close-up

Stoic actor, former diver, has a feel for ‘physical action.’

Jason Statham is a man of few words. He talks in short, sometimes fragmented sentences that reveal a hint of his thoughts but never their entirety.

His terse, gritty persona brings to mind Clint Eastwood. Statham idolizes Eastwood but dismisses any comparisons.

“You got to be careful mentioning people as great as Clint Eastwood,” he warns while adding humbly, “You can’t put me in the same sentence as that man.”

He has more perhaps in common with his “Expendables” co-star Jet Li, who came to acting through martial arts. Statham’s own circuitous path to acting included a stint as an Olympic diver, so it comes as no surprise that he roots his characters in the visceral rather than cerebral realm.

“I have a sense for what feels right in the physical action,” he says of his starring role in Boaz Yakin’s thrill-per-minute “Safe” which is now in theaters. In it, Statham plays Luke Wright, a copturned-ultimate-fighter who loses everything when the wrong person loses a bet on one of his matches. On the verge of suicide, he meets a young girl who’s being used as a pawn by both the Russian and Chinese mafias. They spend the next 90 minutes avoiding capture by some evil men.

“I like the clarity of good versus evil,” Statham says. “People can see the definition between the two. Then you can really hang your hat and get behind the right people. You can just will them through the story.”

With all the bad guys he fights in “Safe” — including a series of men in an intricate subway fight that takes place both inside the train cars and briefly on top of them — there isn’t much time for dialogue. But that doesn’t bother the stoic actor.

“You can’t say more than what they write,” Statham says. “If they have few words to say, that’s what you end up getting.”

As much as the movie can feel like typical Statham fare, there are subtleties in his performance that Yakin is quick to point out.

“There are a lot of actors who I think are more ‘actory,’ but they have to do a lot more work to get to that more simple place that Jason can get to,” Yakin says. “That scene when he comes home and his wife’s been killed, and I just basically move the camera in on his face and stay with him for 30 seconds while literally everyone else is talking, there are not a lot of actors who can hold that close-up.”