I’ve been able to get to know Scott Adkins pretty well. I met him at the press junket for The Expendables 2 where I was perhaps more excited to meet the star of Ninja and Undisputed III than The Transporter or President Camacho. I got to interview Adkins for Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning at Fantastic Fest later that year, and then again when he returned to Austin with Ninja: Shadow of a Tear.
Related: Dolph Lundgren on Legendary & Expendables 3
By the time I got on the phone with him for Legendary, out now on DVD, Askins remembered my name and voice. “I can always count on you, Fred,” he said as we chatted about fitting Legendary in while he recovered from an injury, working in China and the state of the low budget action market. Legendary stars Adkins as a zoologist trying to find a mythical creature before his rival Harker (Dolph Lundgren) gets to it.
CraveOnline: Was Legendary one of the movies you made while you were injured?
Scott Adkins: Yeah, how did you know?
I think I remember we talked about this.
Yeah, I got the surgery after I finished Expendables 2 and I needed six months of really good rehabilitation on the knee. The two films I did in that time were Zero Dark Thirty and Legendary, no action required. I was on holiday.
You still did some rolls. Was that not tough on your knee?
Oh no. At that point, I think that was about six months into the rehabilitation at that point so I started to test it a bit more, so I was happy to do a few rolls. I actually had the whole cast doing the workout which you may have heard of. I’m going to plug it now, called The Insanity Workout.
I haven’t heard of it. What’s that?
It’s called Insanity and it’s like P90X or one of these ones where you have it on a laptop, you play it for 40 minutes and you follow what the guy does. That was my way of rehabilitating my knee at the time. The whole cast was involved. It’s insane.
Is Legendary your first chance to play a squeaky clean hero? He is haunted by guilt but overall more of a white hat good guy than Casey or Boyka.
Yes, definitely is. Although I think I’ve played that before to be honest. I think Casey was still pretty squeaky clean in the first one, the first Ninja. Obviously I’m playing this scientist, a zoologist so that was different. Yeah, it’s nice to play different parts.
Was any of the technical dialogue a challenge to get right?
To be honest, no. I struggled with the American accent on this one, I guess. I was in China, in the middle of nowhere, with internet that didn’t really work very well, didn’t make it very easy for me to talk to my dialect coach. It was a tough shoot as well. China was very hot and I couldn’t really go out in the sun much. That would wear you down, especially on that location which was a beautiful location, but it was difficult to get to. You’d have to get to a boat that would take us to the place where we were doing most of the film and we stayed there all day. We never had a break from the hot Chinese sun, so that was a bit difficult.
Had you done a movie with this much CGI before?
No, not since the film I did at the beginning of my career called Black Mask 2. It was more about where the creatures would be. The bear at the beginning and the dragon at the end obviously wasn’t there so I had to look at these guys in green suits running around holding up a dragon head, which took a bit of getting used to. But, I just thought of an ex-girlfriend and that kept me going.
Now that your knee is better, are you back in full action mode?
I am actually. I’ve been training really hard. I’ve been learning some new moves and things like that, trying to raise the bar again in anticipation hopefully for Undisputed IV or another action film where they let me do the kind of fighting where I can look my best.
Do you have an update for Undisputed IV?
Not yet. The script has been done and the script is being done again. We’ll get there.
Do you have a big role in the Louis Leterrier film, Grimsby?
No, it’s not a big role but it’s decent. They don’t want me to talk about it.
Did you do Close Range with Isaac Florentine?
I’m not sure that’s going to happen. I don’t think they can get enough money to make it right.
Did you do Zero Tolerance with Kaos?
I did, I did.
He just started making movies again since Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, so what was it like to work with Kaos?
It’s good because he’s got his own sort of filmmaking company down in Thailand. So I’m interested in working with him. He’s an interesting guy. I mean, I saw Ecks Vs. Sever. It was what it was but he’s got some interesting ideas about some things. I might work with him again in the future hopefully. He’s a nice guy.
I’m sure there were some compromises on a studio movie. Is that an action role for you in Zero Tolerance?
There’s some action. It’s more of a thriller, but there is action as well. A couple of action sequences I’m involved with. Dustin Nguyen, I have a little bit of a scuffle with him. He did a really good job. I actually don’t have anything to do with Gary Daniels in this film, but might have something in the future to do with Gary so we’ll see. We’ll see if that pans out.
They aired “Metal Hurlant Chronicles” on Syfy here. How did that come about?
It just came up. Larnell [Stovall] was doing the fight choreography on the first one. They already had Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi. Because they had Mike and Darren, I thought I might be involved in this. When the second season came along, they had this thing where they wanted to use the same actors in different parts, and I couldn’t do it at first. They wanted me to do a different episode and I was busy, and then I had a break, I had a bit of time and jumped on to this one second chance, just to keep acting and getting paid. That’s all you can really ask.
Was it a good chance to reunite with Michael and do a different sort of fight scene?
Well, the one I did with Michael, I think we were too ambitious, to be honest, with the action. We were aware that the last thing we’d done together was Undisputed II and we wanted to do something that we thought people might be expecting something good, and I think we were a bit overambitious to be honest. We didn’t have enough time to achieve what we wanted to, but we gave it a good shot. And it’s a TV show as well, so the action as TV shows go is pretty good.
Has the industry caught on to how well you can fight now, and do they see you as both an actor and a fighter?
You know, it’s hard to break into those big budget movies. Maybe I am pigeonholed as a martial artist. When I’ve done a few B movies, maybe it’s tough for people to give me a chance. I don’t know, Fred. You know the drill.
But you did have an acting role in Zero Dark Thirty and you played a villain in The Legend of Hercules which might not have been the biggest Hercules movie of the year, but you know what fans us die hards are. I just wonder if other people are catching on.
I just don’t think Hollywood feels the need for another Van Damme or even a Jackie Chan or a Jet Li, because they’ve moved into this whole comic book thing now. If you’ve got a martial artist like Batman, with the suit, any stuntman can do the kicks. So it’s irrelevant. I think the action guys of the ‘80s have become a little bit obsolete and the only place you can really shine is in the home video market, the low budget films. But unfortunately with all the piracy, there’s less of those films being made. When they do want to make a film like that, the budget really is crunched down and you don’t have enough time to do a decent action film. It’s tough times to be working in the low budget film industry.
Is that a challenge you still feel you can face?
Yeah, I’m still trying. Maybe you got me on an off day and I’m being a bit down on myself. There’s a lot of films falling through because they just don’t make the sort of money that they used to unless they can get onto the cinema. It’s difficult. It’s harder times.
Well, the martial artists maybe rendered obsolete by the comic book movies, unless you create something like The Expendables where it has to be the original guys.
But let’s see if they can do an Expendables with the new people and then we’ll have another genre. Right now it’s that whole nostalgia thing. That’s really what The Expendables is about, the nostalgia of the old action gods getting together.
Was Legendary easy to put together or did it have a rocky preproduction as well?
Well, not for me. It came up. They offered it to me. I thought okay, I don’t want to be doing an action film at the moment so this one could be good. Then you sit, you wait and you think maybe it’s going to happen, maybe it won’t. Then at a certain point you think okay, it’s actually going to happen now. That’s normally the way with all films, even big movies. Sometimes they pull the plug on it. It’s so unstable, this business. I’ve learned not to count my chickens. But it happened and it happened at the right time.
Funny, I think for anyone else, Legendary would be considered an action movie. There’s a lot of running and monsters and adventure, but is it really a light load for you?
Oh yeah, it was a holiday. Although I really struggled with the food in China, I love Chinese people and I’m not saying anything bad about China. All I’m saying is that my stomach is not built for their food.
I imagine you’re a healthy eater to keep in shape. Is it hard to find healthy stuff in their food culture?
The longer I was there, the more I got used to it, but the first month, just trying to adapt to the different smells and the different consistency of the food, I find it really difficult. I really do. But I went back there to do another film and I kind of figured out which dishes I wouldn’t mind as much. So I had a better experience when I went there recently but at that point on this film, Legendary, I found it quite hard actually.
Which was the other film you made in China?
I did a film with a guy called Wu Jin called Wolf War and it hasn’t released in China yet, but it’s a Chinese military movie, modern military warfare. Wu Jing is now making a film with Tony Jaa called SPL 2. Tony Jaa’s manager just let me know that he’d seen a bit of the trailer and that it was looking good.
Of course I’ve seen SPL 1 with Donnie Yen.
Yeah, it should be good, those two together.
If you’re talking with Tony’s manager, is there a chance you guys could get together?
Me and Tony have a mutual respect for each other. I know he’d like to do something with me and I would love to do something with him. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that we can do it before we need the Zimmer frames.
Before you need what?
Zimmer frames. Do they have those in America? What old people use to help them walk.
I didn’t know they had a name. We just call them walkers. So if any actors on a movie like Legendary think it’s tough, should they know there’s a whole other level of action they don’t even know about?
Oh yeah, a walk in the park.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
