14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, legendary martial arts star Jackie Chan brought his latest project to the Cannes Film Festival. While promoting it, he also said he would retire from action movies: he's now backpedaling on that statement.
As we also noted on Saturday, Jackie Chan told the press that “Chinese Zodiac,” which he wrote, directed and starred in, would be his last project of the kind because he wanted to focus more on serious roles.
On his Facebook page, Jackie claims his statement was blown out of proportion in the press: he has no plans to retire, so he was only thinking about slowing down a bit, because his body is no longer up to the challenge.
“Hello all my friends and fans, Yesterday in my press conference in Cannes for Chinese 12 Zodiac I said that this movie was my last big action movie,” the actor writes.
“Today I was shocked when I woke up to read all the news coverage that I was retiring from doing Action movies,” he adds.
Jackie goes on to explain that he was merely trying to say that he would be taking better care of himself from now on by no longer accepting roles as physically demanding as before.
“I just want to let everyone know that I am not retiring from doing action movies. What I meant to say is that I need to do less of the life risking stunts on my movies. After all these years of doing so many stunts and breaking so many bones, I need to take better care of my body so I can keep working,” Jackie writes.
“I will continue to do international action movies. And I will keep improving my English :-),” he concludes.
Indeed, from his previous statements, one could only understand that he would be turning his back to the genre because he was growing old and out of a desire to prove he could also do serious acting.
A trailer for his latest film, “Chinese Zodiac,” has been released and you can see it below, embedded at the end of the article.
It would have been a shame if Jackie simply stopped doing films like this.
