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Jason Li, from martial arts to Hollywood stunt double and daredevil
The professional movie stunt double talks about ‘tricking’, his early Hollywood breaks and taking risks in an inconsistent industry
Reading Time:5 minutes
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The 1980s and 90s were the heyday for Hong Kong action movies, and I was exposed to a lot of that on television as a kid. My parents are from Hong Kong and I was born in 1990 in Texas, in the United States, where most of my mum’s family live. My dad was a civil engineer and we moved to Hong Kong when I was three. I was a big fan of Power Rangers, a TV show that started off in Japan, about a bunch of people who have the ability to transform and enhance their powers to defend the Earth. My younger brother and I had Power Rangers toys and acted it out.
Jet propulsion
One of my favourite movies was The One (2001), starring Jet Li. It was about parallel universes. There were a lot of really cool moments when he was fighting himself, which got me thinking about how they shot it. CGI wasn’t advanced back then and they had to use stunt doubles and tricky camerawork.
The flip side
I went to Chinese International School (CIS). I started doing martial arts when I was about nine and really got into it in my teens. I switched between doing wushu and taekwondo at CIS. Wushu takes a lot more discipline, which was one of the reasons I stopped for a bit, because I thought it was too restrictive. When YouTube came out, in 2005, I came across a video called Urban Ninja, which showed a guy doing random flips on the street. It moved my focus towards a sport called tricking – it’s all the tricks of martial arts.
Trials and errors
One night my dad walked into my room and saw me watching a video of the tricks and said it looked dangerous and warned me not to do it. I understood he was looking out for me, but I still wanted to do it. After school, I trained with a couple of friends who were also into Chinese martial arts. I started with the front flip, running to get momentum. I like to describe it as if you are falling, but you fail to fall. And then you eat it over and over, hitting the deck. You have to start somewhere.
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