In his entire movie career, Jackie Chan has only played two true villain roles. For decades, the martial arts star’s reputation has been built on his heroic roles. Since the late 1970s, Chan has typically played the protagonist in nearly all of his kung fu movies.
It wasn’t until starring in movies like Jimmy Wang Yu.
Jackie Chan’s Young Tiger Role Explained
Chan’s Young Tiger villain stands in stark contrast to every other character he’s ever played. Credited “Mole Face Gang Leader,” Chan’s villain was an unscrupulous gangster with a large mole on his face that was impossible to ignore. After harassing the main character – played by Lin Chiu – for nearly the whole movie, the criminal and his gang faced off against him in Young Tiger’s finale and were defeated in a one-on-one fight to end the story.
Jackie Chan’s The Killer Meteors Role Explained
The Killer Meteors was a martial period piece and an action vehicle for Jimmy Wang Yu, an A-list Hong Kong actor and a pioneer of the martial arts movie genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the movie, Chan’s Immortal Meteor was a notorious martial artist who began a pursuit of an antidote after being poisoned by his wife. To this end, he hired Jimmy Wang Yu’s Killer Meteor to track her down. While the hero started out in the employ of Chan’s character, he eventually found himself on the opposing side. The movie concluded with a brutal showdown between the two that ended in Immortal Meteor’s death and one of the few times a Jackie Chan character has actually died in a movie.
Why Jackie Chan Doesn’t Like To Play Villains
There’s a good reason why Young Tiger and The Killer Meteors are the only villain roles in Chan’s career. There were obviously other opportunities, such as the time Sylvester Stallone offered him the part of the villain in Demolition Man before giving it to Wesley Snipes, but Chan always ed on them in favor of playing heroes instead. According to Chan’s autobiography, Never Grow Up, the actor prefers not to go against his onscreen image as a good-natured everyman. Ultimately, that’s why so many of Jackie Chan’s movie characters feel so similar to each other.
