Jason Statham can kick your ass. A no-frills, all-muscle English action star who is best-known for starring in over-the-top escapist film franchises like The Transporter and Crank and ensemble hits like The Italian Job and Snatch. He's a tough guy who delivers exactly as advertised when the menu calls for big physical stunts and loads of ass kicking.
An Oscar-winning actor he is not. An unapologetic tough guy and engaging screen presence, he most certainly is. As one of the few British action stars to make it big in America in movies like Cellular and Death Race, Jason Statham looks to continue his reign of kicking ass and taking names as one of the all-star action heroes in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables.
" A lot of action movies today seem to have scenes that just lead up to the action."
Like the iconic action god Chuck Norris and his Expendables co-star Sylvester Stallone before him, Jason Statham has a lean muscular frame and an overall expression that screams "badass" with every glance. Throw in a sweet ride (his prized Audi S4) and an English accent that's only growing in pop culture coolness and Jason Statham is a ruggedly handsome babe magnet of the highest order. He's an unpredictable man's man who we imagine would take his woman out for a steak dinner and a speedy evening drive before crashing a trendy nightspot and duking it out with any dude who would dare to cut in on his action.
If we've established that Jason Statham is a target of female attention, the question remains: What kinds of women does he like? To put it simply, he likes beautiful ones, as per his seven-year relationship with the lovely Kelly Brook and his current tryst with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria's Secret Angel. Statham has also had experience in the company of Playboy models, given his 2008 invite to Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion for the Midnight Summer Dream Party. Humorously enough, he was asked to leave when he refused to be in pictures with the models. One might assume that he was too distracted in the observing of the scenery around him.
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Jason Statham is not an action star who operates at the level of Arnold, Sly or Willis. That's not to say that he isn't getting there. With age on his side, seasoned martial arts skills to put into play, and an effortlessly cool accent to boot, Jason Statham's unique brand of action and charisma have given him a loyal audience that has followed his most popular characters, Frank Martin and Chev Chelios, through multiple entries in the Transporter and Crank movies, respectively. To date, Statham's films have collectively grossed in excess of $1 billion in box office, but his most financially successful and most notable projects have been ensemble movies like The Italian Job, Snatch. and The Expendables, showing that he's most visible when he's part of the right team.
Staying true to his action star idols Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, Jason Statham shuns the use of stunt doubles. Preferring to do the vast majority of his own driving stunts, fight scenes and aerial stunts -- which have included hanging from a helicopter in Crank -- he feels confident when he's in control of his own destiny. He just doesn't mention it to his family ahead of time if he's planning on putting his life in danger that day. To some, it sounds dangerous, but to him, it comes with the territory.
JASON STATHAM BIOGRAPHY
Jason Statham grew up in England, where his interest in sports superseded any desire to follow in the paths of his artistically inclined parents, who were involved in music and performance. Football, gymnastics and martial arts became Statham's athletic hobbies of choice until his teenage years when he became obsessed with diving. The obsession led to a place on Britain's National Diving Squad and a series of international diving competitions, culminating in a respectable 12th place ranking as part of the 1992 World Championships.
The love of sports that Jason Statham possessed was physically fulfilling, but financially unrewarding, and he soon turned to other money-making measures to make ends meet. One of these was hawking imitation (and sometimes stolen) jewelry in briefcases on London street corners. The experienced proved to be an education in acting as much as it was an education in hustling. He wouldn't have to keep conning for long though: Things changed significantly for Statham when, during a workout at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, he was approached by an agent who suggested that he could find work as a model. After accepting the offer to pursue modeling, Statham earned early modeling gigs for Tommy Hilfiger, Levi Strauss & Co. and French Connection.
Jason Statham Stars In The Transporter And Crank
Through his work with French Connection, Jason Statham was introduced to an upstart director named Guy Ritchie. The director, aware of his past work as a street con, asked him to audition to play a similar hustler named Bacon in the film, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.
After trying to sell the director fake jewelry as part of the audition, Jason Statham secured the role in the well-received 1998 crime drama, as well as Guy Ritchie's next film, Snatch., alongside Benicio del Toro and Brad Pitt. Statham's work for Guy Ritchie allowed him to enter the American film market soon after, with his role in 2001's The One as a futuristic agent being particularly enjoyable as it gave him the opportunity to share the screen with one of his martial arts idols, Jet Li.
A year later, Jason Statham came into his own as an international action star by playing Frank Martin, the titular tough guy delivery man in The Transporter. Jason Statham top-lined the action-adventure film and pressed the studio to allow him to perform his own stunts. After a turn in the Mark Wahlberg-Charlize Theron-Edward Norton heist drama, The Italian Job and a role as the chief villain in the Kim Basinger-Chris Evans suspense, Cellular, Statham returned to the shoes of Frank Martin for the successful 2004 sequel, The Transporter 2.
A 2005 reteaming with Guy Ritchie called Revolver went nowhere, but in 2006, Jason Statham embodied another memorable character, Chev Chelios, in the film Crank. Though the ludicrous plot had his hit man character seeking adrenaline from hospital paddles and brazen public sex with his girlfriend (Amy Smart) to ward off the effects of poison, the film and Statham embraced the film's camp value and made it into another hit as well.
Jason Statham Stars In The Bank Job And The Expendables
The Bank Job, a 2008 caper film that dramatized a 1971 robbery in London, dialed down on the action of Jason Statham's previous films and ultimately gave the actor some of the most positive reviews of his career. He followed it up with the futuristic remake, Death Race, which cast him as a driver racing for his life inside a corrupt prison. Statham closed out the year with Transporter 3, the third entry in the action series that carried the added twist of seeing him perform his usual stunts and fight scenes with an explosive device strapped to his wrist for the majority of the film's running time.
In 2009, Jason Statham returned to play Chev Chelios one more time in Crank: High Voltage. Instead of serving off poison, he was faced with seeking out electric shocks to try to maintain an unreliable artificial heart -- a task that found him getting juiced from jumper cables, catching fire and having even more public sex.
In the summer of 2010, Jason Statham substituted the electricity of Crank for massive amounts of testosterone by joining the cast of the highest-profile ensemble film yet -- The Expendables, with Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Following The Expendables, he went straight back to work on The Mechanic, The Killer Elite (with Robert De Niro and Clive Owen) and 13 (with Mickey Rourke, Emmanuelle Chriqui and 50 Cent).
