When you say that you are meeting Jackie Chan, everyone grins. Friends, family, colleagues… nobody has a bad word to say. It’s a bit of a surprise when you consider that he found fame by falling over and beating people up. Then again, Chan is one of the most famous men on the planet, and really he has got there by making us smile. He doesn’t come to mind as quickly as a Clooney or a Cruise, but he is probably more recognisable than either. After Obama, the Pope, and a handful of footballers, it is hard to think of anyone who would have been seen by a bigger audience. During the nearly 50 years he has been working, hundreds of millions – perhaps billions – have been charmed by a Chan movie. He is the eternal cheeky underdog, with lightning fists and an open face that seems forever on the cusp of either tears or laughter.
As he walks through the hotel where we are due to talk, there is a warm murmur of recognition from children and adults alike. In person he is ageless, slim with thick dark hair. “I can’t go out any more,” he says. “I used to love coming to London. I’d go to antiques shops and markets, walk around, go to the theatre. Now I just stay in the hotel. I eat in the hotel, sleep in the hotel, do interviews in the hotel. Then I leave. If I go out people follow me, surround me, shout, take pictures.
“It’s better in Britain than in China. I tried to go shoe-shopping in China and the shop was surrounded by something like 20,000 people. They had to get the police special forces to create a cordon for me to run out through.”
Is anywhere safe? Apparently not the South Pacific, where Chan filmed his most recent film, Chinese Zodiac, in Vanuatu.
“The country only has a population of 25,000, mostly natives without shoes. But when I drove through, the whole village was on the street, shouting: ‘Jackie! Jackie!’ The only people they’d heard of were Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan.” He refers to himself often in the third person.
“Sometimes I miss being more private. I used to wander around with my sunglasses on and people wouldn’t know it was me. But one day I woke up and the whole world knew Jackie Chan, from tiny children to old people. That was around 27 years ago. Since then it has been the same everywhere I go. So many people want a piece of Jackie Chan.”
He is in town for two days to promote Zodiac and has flown from China, where he is filming Dragon Blade, an action film, with Adrian Brody and John Cusack. The following evening he will fly back. It’s an exhausting schedule for anyone, let alone someone who just turned 60.
“I’ve wanted to retire for a long, long time! But people keep offering me good scripts – although not for romance films – and I think of myself as lucky to be working. So for the next five years I am busy.” As well as Dragon Blade there is a new Karate Kid movie and Skiptrace, an action-comedy (surprise surprise) with Seann William Scott, as well as a mooted fourth instalment of the Rush Hour franchise. “It’s movie after movie after movie. I’m not one of these actors like Chris Tucker [his co-star in Rush Hour] who make one movie and take three years off.”
Neither does he believe in the traditional Hollywood displays of family devotion.”You get these guys who say, ‘I have to be near my family, so I won’t leave Los Angeles.’ Then it ends in divorce! I don’t think that’s marriage. A good husband works, and for my work I have to travel. Sometimes I won’t see my wife for months. Caring about my family doesn’t necessarily mean sitting on the sofa next to my wife every day.”
Since 1982 Chan has been married to Lin Feng-jiao, an actor. They have a son, Jaycee, born in the same year and currently trying to break into the industry himself. From an affair in the late 90s Chan also has a daughter, Etta Ng, whom he only recently acknowledged. Previously he had shrugged off the infidelity as “something which all men do”, but last year he opened up when launching a movie with a plot about a father whose busy work life means he neglects his daughter. “It struck a chord with me,” he said, “because I neglected her for the longest time.”
This attitude to parenting – and Chan’s work ethic – both seem to stem from his upbringing. Chan was born in 1954 in Hong Kong, with the christened name Chan Hong-San, meaning “born in Hong Kong”. His parents both worked at the French Embassy, his father Charles in the kitchen, his mother Lee-Lee as a cleaner. Chan senior taught his son kung fu, and when Jackie was seven he was enrolled at China’s strict Central Academy of Drama. There he would train obsessively, punching and kicking thousands of times a day. A few years later Charles and Lee-Lee moved to Australia, leaving their son to his studies.
Later Chan would learn that his parents had abandoned previous families, his father leaving two sons, his mother two daughters, in mainland China when they moved to Hong Kong in 1949. His mother had also worked as an opium smuggler and was a legendary gambler. Charles had been a spy and a gangland figure, and had originally been called Fang Dao-long. “I was shocked,” said Jackie. “I thought he was just a cook.”
Independent from a young age, Chan honed his skills in dancing and singing, as well as martial arts, before starting out in stunt work. “I was so, so poor,” he says. “I was doing dangerous stunts for less than a pound a day.” A collapse in Hong Kong cinema led to a stint working in construction in Australia before Chan forged a tentative career in the movies. After the sudden death of Bruce Lee in 1973 Chan seemed the obvious heir, but proved more versatile than the legend. In particular, he had great comic timing, as he proved in Drunken Master (1978), the film that made him a star.
Over the next 10 years, various vehicles to establish Chan in the US sputtered while his career in Asia zoomed ahead. He established his own production company as well as an association for stuntmen. American success came in the 90s, through Rumble in the Bronx (1995) and then the Rush Hour (1998) series, as well as Around the World in 80 Days (2004), with Steve Coogan. In Hollywood he usually takes a more traditional supporting actor, but on his own projects he often has near-total creative control, producing, writing, directing and starring in the films.
“When I direct, the film is like my baby,” he says. “I have to make sure there is comedy but no dirty comedy, and a positive message. I like people to believe the stunts are real – it’s not like Spider-Man or Iron Man where a 20-minute scene can be pure CGI. I only use a tiny bit of special effects. I want it to be believable, so where I used to do a triple kick, I now just do one. Eventually there will be no kicks. There has to be plenty of action, but not violence.”
To the untrained eye, it seems like there is rather a lot of violence in his films, even if it tends to the cartoonish rather than the graphic. But Chan says the unthreatening brand of action is one reason why his movies tend to do well internationally. Given the size of the appetite for cinema in China – Transformers: Age of Extinction has taken more there than it did in the US – Chan’s global outlook is highly in demand. Watching Chinese Zodiac it is noticeable how inoffensive the humour and the villains are.
“I have a dilemma,” he says. “I love action, but I hate violence. There is so much violence in the world, from video games and from other movies. I want my movies to have a message of peace, and helping each other.
“Education is so important. When I was growing up I believed a lot of traditional stuff because I was so dumb! I believed that the moon had magical powers, until I saw the guys go and walk on it. I almost admire the businessmen who can sell you anything: ‘it’s your birthday, have some cake, it’s your party, have some champagne, you’re hurt, have some tiger bone, you’re sick, have some bear bile. Even in kung fu, they say you can hurt someone with a 3in punch. It’s bullshit. You hurt someone by punching them. It’s a corruption. You have to keep working and keep learning. If children are playing video games or lying in bed they won’t.”
Chan is also a Unicef ambassador and supports wildlife charities as well as educational projects in China. “We have 26 schools and more being built. You have no idea how poor some of the places in China are until you see them. I wish I had more learning. When I was a kid I wanted to be a lawyer or an engineer or a doctor. You wish for your children what you didn’t have yourself, so I thought that’s what Jaycee would do. But he went into entertainment! He told my wife when he was 15, and she wept. ‘Why are you crying,’ I asked. ‘Because I’ve already lost my husband to this profession,’ she said.”
In Asia, Chan is an industry. He has restaurants, theatres, a coffee business, a clothing label, a watch business. Boats, cars, planes, water, wine. He is the Hong Kong distributor for Segways. Plans are afoot for a Jackie Chan theme park in China, where he will house memorabilia from his career. “People come to me with these ideas. They want to break into the Chinese market, and ask if I can help, and if I like the idea I do.” He is also a pop star – recently he played a gig to 38,000 people. “More of a party for me,” he says. Neither he nor his manager claim to know what his total wealth is. “Nobody has time to check!” he says, but estimates put it at $130m.
Chan’s status has brought other pressures. At times he has been criticised for supporting the Chinese government. He has suggested the freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong are not necessarily desirable. But he seems to be happy with his hometown in 2014. Does he expect China to gradually withdraw the freedom of expression and assembly enjoyed by the former British colony? “No, life in Hong Kong is good,” he says. “It’s the same as it was before. My friends who moved away because they were scared of what would happen in 1997 [when Hong Kong rejoined China] are returning, but they are finding that they can’t afford a house any more. They are full of regret.
“I don’t worry about money. If I want a car, a boat, a plane, I can buy it,” says Chan, who had plenty of Ferraris and Porsches when he was younger. “But it’s not interesting any more. Now I wear the same clothes every day – these trousers are from Gap. I only want money so I can give it away. The only thing I would like to buy is time. There isn’t enough.”
Chinese Zodiac is out now on Blu-ray and DVD, from Universal Pictures (UK)
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