The last action hero: Jason Statham. Photo / Getty Images
The Olympic diver turned market trader and unlikely film star outstrips Daniel Craig, Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch at the box office.
Jason Statham is hard, diamond hard — the epitome of a diamond geezer. Indeed, the man is so brave that he almost died doing a stunt that your typical, flimsy Hollywood star would have asked somebody else to do.
Over to Sylvester Stallone, his co-star in The Expendables 3. The pair were filming by the Black Sea in Bulgaria a decade ago. “Jason faced death. He was test-driving a truck and the brakes cut out. It went down 60ft into the sea,” he recounted at the premiere. “If anybody else had been in that truck, we would have been dead. We would’ve drowned. But because Jason is an Olympic-quality diver, he got out.”
So, who is this guy? To many, if Jason Statham means anything, he’s the stubbly, muscled bald guy in a suit behind the model and actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley whenever she’s on the red carpet.
But to his devoted fans, Statham is the last British action hero. His tough-guy movies have made billions at the worldwide box office. Now the action man, 56, is on a new mission, starring in the revenge thriller The Beekeeper. He plays a man who keeps bees — but is also a former operative for a clandestine organisation with scores to settle after the death of his friend. And the film will take far more money than the Emma Stone Oscar favourite Poor Things.
His rise through the ranks is, to say the least, unusual. As Stallone said, he actually used to be a diver — a member of Britain’s national swimming squad for 12 years, who finished 12th in the world championships in 1992. (See the clip below, he even had hair then.)
There was also a time when Statham used to hustle a living flogging tat to tourists on the streets around Harrods in London — but huckstering won him his role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, because the director Guy Ritchie wanted someone authentic to play the black-market salesman Bacon.
“I feel like I’ve had four careers,” the actor told Esquire a few years ago. “The career of a street trader, the career of a sportsman and, now, a career of something different. Three, actually. I’ve had three careers.”
Statham makes the sort of film best watched on a Friday night, when you do not want to think. We need brain emptiers such as this, a strong man in a silly plot. Take Crank (2006) — in which Statham’s character is told that he has to keep his adrenaline pumping, or die. Or The Transporter (2002), in which he transports people and things against all odds. And don’t forget The Meg (2018) — a shark film that exists purely because a studio exec thought, “What if we did Jaws, but bigger?”
Throw in Statham’s recurring roles in the biggest, brawniest movies around — from The Expendables (Stallone, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson) to Fast & Furious (cars) — and there is a case to be made that this resolutely non-Rada actor is the country’s most sought-after star working today.
Indeed, if you discount British actors in mega-franchises such as the Marvel, Twilight, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Batman films, and add Statham’s box-office takings in the US, you’ll calculate he’s the most successful actor that we have ever exported.
And that caveat of removing those franchise films isn’t a cheat. Nobody goes to Marvel blockbusters because they like a particular actor, they go because they are already fans of a comic book. Yet Statham’s fans go to his films simply because of Statham. He is his own franchise. You know what you are going to get — brutal yet sardonic, the actor is a throwback to the late-1980s when Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis propped up an entire industry.
Of course, our views of modern masculinity have changed, and a new generation of tender leading men — Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney — took over. But Statham is the anomaly — Manchester University even commissioned a study into his “masculinity” and its impact on cinema. You don’t need eggheads to work out what is going on here. Statham keeps it simple: lines are for learning and bones are for breaking. He knows that most people see films for fun, not for a lecture.
Critics are snooty — the highest praise The Guardian has offered seems to be “not half bad” and “oddly entertaining”. The New York Times focuses on Statham’s “limitations as an actor”. But the man knows what his fans want. “I’ve always been apprehensive about a comedy because they’re either brilliant or f***ing terrible,” Statham told Esquire, of staying in his lane. “But at least in making an action film, there’s always going to be someone who wants to see a car chase.”
When asked if he had ever sat in a premiere watching one of his 61 films and thought, “Oh, no …”, he replied, “More often than not.” Asked to name his films that he thought were any good, he said the ones by Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, Snatch and Revolver); The Bank Job (based on a 1971 Baker Street heist); The Transporter (one and two); and Crank. “And the rest are shite!” he said with a laugh.
Statham was born in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, in 1967, the son of Eileen, a dancer, and Barry, a street seller, house painter and coalminer. When he was 14 he went with Barry — whom everyone called “Nogger” — to London to push iffy goods. “I was a sort of fly-pitcher street-corner conman, who sold jewellery out of a briefcase,” Statham said. He had friends with nicknames like “Fish Fibbens”, and would drive cars illegally fast for kicks through the capital. He even drove himself to his driving test, only to fail, before driving himself back to try again another time.
But that was just one side of him — restless Statham soon became a model for fashion brands such as Levi’s, Tommy Hilfiger and French Connection. “We chose Jason because we wanted our model to look like a normal guy,” a French Connection spokesman explained. “His look is just right for now — very masculine and not too male-modelly.” And once that unconventionally hot face was in the spotlight, the movies followed.
Britain’s least likely Hollywood star soon charmed his way into the celebrity elite. He lives in London with his long-term partner Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the face of Marks & Spencer; his son, Jack, six; and his daughter, Isabella, one. Some years ago I was having lunch in a Los Angeles members’ club at the same time as Charlize Theron and Will Smith, but it was Statham who drew the most well-wishers to his table.
Van Connor, a British film critic, says that Statham stands apart from the roster of cinema stars. “Playing up to his Lock, Stock-era lad image has the handy side-effect of insulating the Stath against criticism. He caters to his fans in a manner you’d expect more from an Asian action star.”
But what comes next? Statham is pushing 60. He surely needs to find a less punishing form of acting. In Crank he hung out of a helicopter. In Transporter 2, he jumped off a jet ski and on to a bus. “I’ve got so many injuries,” he said last year. “They’ve taken their toll. My body is wearing out a little bit.”
Once, Statham said that he fancied being James Bond. But that was never going to happen, because of all British actors today he is the one least likely to have gone to Eton. We like our artistic exports to be niche, odd and, ideally, posh, not mainstream and everyman. We celebrate Radiohead and Benedict Cumberbatch, Florence Welch and Emerald Fennell. Not balding fiftysomething blokes from Derbyshire. But is it not time that we celebrate the real deal?
The Beekeeper is in New Zealand cinemas from January 11.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.