page_title: Jackie Chan
section_title: Stunts and screen persona
hierarchical_section_title: Jackie Chan / Stunts and screen persona
caption_attribution_description: English: Jackie Chan at the Cannes Film Festival
context_page_description: Chan Kong-sang SBS MBE PMW, known professionally as Jackie Chan, is a Hong Kong martial artist, actor, stuntman, film director, action choreographer, screenwriter, producer, and singer. He is known in the cinematic world for his slapstick acrobatic fighting style, comic timing, use of improvised weapons, and innovative stunts, which he typically performs himself. He has trained in Wushu or Kung Fu and Hapkido, and has been acting since the 1960s, appearing in over 150 films.
  Chan is one of the most recognisable and influential cinematic personalities in the world, gaining a widespread following in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and has received stars on the Hong Kong Avenue of Stars and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has been referenced in various pop songs, cartoons, and video games. He is an operatically trained vocalist and is also a Cantopop and Mandopop star, having released a number of albums and sung many of the theme songs for the films in which he has starred. He is also a globally known philanthropist and has been named as one of the top 10 most charitable celebrities by Forbes magazine.
context_section_description: Chan has performed most of his own stunts throughout his film career, which are choreographed by the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. He has stated in interviews that the primary inspiration for his more comedic stunts were films such as The General, directed by and starring Buster Keaton who was also known to perform his own stunts. The team was established in 1983, and Chan has used them in all his subsequent films to make choreographing easier, given his understanding of each member's abilities. Chan and his team undertake many of the stunts performed by other characters in his films, shooting the scenes so that their faces are obscured.
  In 1982, Jackie Chan began experimenting with elaborate stunt action sequences in Dragon Lord, which featured a pyramid fight scene that holds the record for the most takes required for a single scene, with 2900 takes, and the final fight scene where he performs various stunts, including one where he does a backflip off a loft and falls to the lower ground. In 1983, Project A saw the official formation of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and typical slapstick humor (at one point, Chan falls from the top of a clock tower through a series of fabric canopies).
  Police Story (1985) contained many large-scale action scenes, including an opening sequence featuring a car chase through a shanty town, Chan stopping a double-decker bus with his service revolver and a climactic fight scene in a shopping mall. This final scene earned the film the nickname "Glass Story" by the crew, due to the huge number of panes of sugar glass that were broken. During a stunt in this last scene, in which Chan slides down a pole from several stories up, the lights covering the pole had heated it considerably, resulting in Chan suffering second-degree burns, particularly to his hands, as well as a back injury and dislocation of his pelvis upon landing. Chan performed similarly elaborate stunts in numerous other films, such as several Police Story sequels, Project A Part II, the Armor of God series, Dragons Forever, Drunken Master II, Rumble in the Bronx, and the Rush Hour series, among others.
  The dangerous nature of his stunts makes it difficult to get insurance, especially in the United States where his stunt work is contractually limited. Chan holds the Guinness World Record for "Most Stunts by a Living Actor", which emphasises that "no insurance company will underwrite Chan's productions in which he performs all his own stunts".
  Chan has been injured frequently when attempting stunts; many of them have been shown as outtakes or as bloopers during the closing credits of his films. He came closest to death filming Armour of God when he fell from a tree and fractured his skull. Over the years, he has dislocated his pelvis and also broken numerous parts of his body, including his fingers, toes, nose, both cheekbones, hips, sternum, neck, ankle, and ribs. Promotional materials for Rumble in the Bronx emphasised that he performed all of the stunts, and one version of the movie poster even diagrammed his many injuries.
  Chan created his screen persona as a response to the late Bruce Lee and the numerous imitators who appeared before and after Lee's death. Lee's characters were typically stern, morally upright heroes. In contrast, Chan plays well-meaning, slightly foolish regular men, often at the mercy of their friends, girlfriends, or families, who always triumph in the end despite the odds. Additionally, he has stated that he deliberately styles his movement to be the opposite of Lee's: where Lee held his arms wide, Chan holds his tight to the body; where Lee was loose and flowing, Chan is tight and choppy. Despite the success of the Rush Hour series, Chan has stated that he is not a fan of it since he neither appreciates the action scenes in the movie nor understands American humor.
  In the 2000s, the ageing Chan grew tired of being typecast as an action hero, prompting him to act with more emotion in his latest films. In New Police Story, he portrayed a character suffering from a
caption: Jackie Chan at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival
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