Jason Statham Doesn’t Want His Characters to Get Punched
Stuntman Eddie J. Fernandez, who’s worked with Statham on seven movies, breaks down the nuts and bolts of a fight scene with the star.
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Within the hallowed annals of Stathamology — within the multibillion-dollar-grossing, karate-kicking, larynx-crushing filmic oeuvre of Jason Statham — Eddie J. Fernandez may be Hollywood’s foremost expert. The veteran stunt performer/martial artist/actor/action choreographer’s career spans some 300 movies, including Jurassic World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, No Country for Old Men, Batman Begins, and even the 2004 Best Picture Oscar winner Crash. And over the last four decades, he has been on the receiving end of shotgun blasts, hand grenades, and headbutts from the crème de la crème of action-thrillerdom: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dwayne Johnson, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, and Will Smith among them.
But since 2006, Fernandez has quietly built a side renown as the industry’s preeminent foil to Statham’s ultraviolent mayhem in seven films: as a stuntman in Crank, Crank: High Voltage, 2010’s The Expendables, The Mechanic, and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and as an action choreographer for the British tough guy’s last two movies, The Beekeeper (2024) and A Working Man, in theaters now.
Fernandez has been killed by Statham onscreen so many times, he has trouble keeping all the details straight. In the David Ayer–directed A Working Man, Statham portrays a kind of blue-collar brute: a former special-ops soldier now working as a construction foreman who embarks on a spree of righteous murder and gratuitous disembowelment when the daughter of his employer is kidnapped as part of a human-trafficking operation. We see drug dealers, outlaw bikers, and Russian mobsters succumb to the action hero’s superior foot-fist way — Fernandez among them, in a bit part as a thug who gets his ass kicked by Statham at a downtown construction jobsite. Which is all the more self-flagellating when you consider that Fernandez also choreographed the stunts and fighting: conjuring action sequences, plotting every beat of them out with a team using previsualization software, further refining the scenes with Statham and Ayer in preproduction, and making last-minute tweaks before cameras rolled.
Speaking via Zoom, Fernandez broke down for Vulture the nuts and bolts of a Jason Statham fight scene — detailing, in particular, how the star “doesn’t want to get punched.”
Has there been an evolution in the way that you’ve seen Statham approach stuntwork over the years?
In the beginning, the studio wouldn’t let him do certain things. They didn’t want him to get hurt. But then Tom Cruise comes along and he wants to do all his own stunts. He’s the moneyman. He produced a lot of his own movies, so there was nobody to say no. Then you got Keanu Reeves. He trains hard! It’s five in the morning, he’s training with these fighters.
So we’d sneak in these little fights with him and the producers would say, “You did it?!” Yes, he did it, and now they’re impressed that he did all this stuff. Not only that, the directors are impressed. Now, they could shoot him without hiding his face. And when it comes to the stunt double, now they could actually see Jason doing the whole fight without cuts. So now they can get a longer performance and make their days and move on to the next scene. Jason himself is very good, an athletic man. With fights, he helps choreograph them. We train, he rehearses them. By the time we’re on set, he knows every move so there’s no hiccups.
When it comes to stunts and fights, you have said that Jason knows exactly what he wants. What is he looking for? What are the components of a good Jason Statham fight?
It starts from the script: It says at that moment in the movie, he bumps into X amount of people. Along that story line, he’s already been down in the dumps; now he needs to shine.
His thing is he doesn’t want to get punched. I told Jason on this movie, “Hey, you got to take a hit. The audience wants to see you take a hit.”
“All right, Eddie.” So there’s some hits he took on this movie.
But other than that, for Jason, we choreograph with a fight team. We figure out the area we’re going to be in. Is it outside, inside, is it in a bar? So now we come up with objects to use and where he’s going to fall and where’s the next person going to fall. And then once we get a fight scene together, we show it to Jason and David, our director.
They look at it and then Jason throws his, “Hey, opposite of this, can I go here and then throw this guy and then maybe wind up over here so I could get out easier?”
And I’m like, Hell yeah!
We redo the fight choreography, we shoot the previs again, and then we show him and then David. Once we get green-lit by everybody, that’s what we’re going to do. We rehearse it, and rehearse it, and rehearse it. Jason likes to come in and learn every beat so when he’s on set, nobody’s waiting for him because he knows everything. That’s what’s really cool. A lot of actors don’t do that; they’ll just try to break it down. Not him, he’ll go as far as we could go.
I mean, after he takes on a giant shark, there’s really almost nothing he can’t take on. But you said something that’s so interesting to me, which is that he doesn’t want to get hit, and you had to be like, “You need to take some punches for this to look realistic.”
Look at all his movies: There’s so many people he’s fighting, and once in a while, somebody will throw a punch. I said, “I know you got a pretty face, but we need to see a little blood here, a little cut here.”
Is he contractually obligated to win all the fights?
I mean [in A Working Man], we put him in a situation where he does get knocked out. We finally say, “Hey, you’re out.” So, yeah, he gets some blows. Then his character wakes up and he’s in a van like, “What just happened?” And he assesses where he’s at and he knows that he has to do something; otherwise, he’s a goner. This is where Jason’s thoughts and ideas start coming in, like, “Boom, we’re going to use this, what is he going to do? How are we going to get him out of these handcuffs?”
You did action choreography on The Beekeeper and A Working Man. In both those movies, about 85 percent of the way through, there’s a climactic fight between Jason and the one character in the film who poses a serious threat to him. Is that by design? The character’s name is Dutch in this movie.
All I know is when I saw Dutch, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he’s a big guy. How are we going to bring him down?” I started thinking of how you bring a tree down: You start chiseling away. That’s exactly how we broke that fight. Little by little, we had to get him down to his level when he’s on his knees and finally — good-bye. But it was just too much to put in a movie where we were crunched on time. We had to X a lot of these actions out. It came down more down to ground and pound, just finish it up real quick.
Jason knows his audience. I almost feel like Jason Statham fans are like, “We don’t want to see our guy get beat up.” So when you come to plotting the action, do you keep that in mind?
Of course. We say, “Well, then, if we hit him too early, he’s going to have to wear this throughout the rest of the show. No, that’s not Jason. The audience loves Jason’s look. We want to make sure that he’s okay.”
We do body hits, a lot of body hits. So you know he’s taking some punches and some kicks and getting thrown against the wall or stuff like that. And it’s all internal, you never see it in the face.
Vulture compiled a ranking of his top kills in all his movies. And a bunch of things that you are in and have choreographed are on there. I wanted to run through a couple of these kills to find out if it was you in the scene. At No. 7, in Crank, Jason hacks off a guy’s hand, which is holding a gun, then he uses the guy’s own hand to make him shoot himself. Is that you?
No. At that time, I was one of the stunt fighters. I played a henchman. But it’s so funny because the hand got cut, and then there was the neck. I mean, the head. I was like, What kind of movie are we doing? But to see all that, to me, I just love it and it’s fun and it’s doable. It’s a little cheesy, but it’s so cool.
In Crank 2: High Voltage, Jason crushes a guy’s testicles, then jams a needle in his neck. Was that you?
No, but I was there. It was a closed set. Sometimes when there’s nudity being shot, it’s best to have less people on set for people to perform their scenes. We all try to stay away and let them feel comfortable. That’s a very hard thing to do, a scene like that. Even though we think, Oh, that was funny, it’s hard to shoot it. It takes a lot out of people, a lot of energy, a lot of emotions come out.
In The Mechanic, Jason harpoons a guy, snaps his neck, and uses him as a human shield. You?
I hardly remember that. I played one of the henchmen that comes out of the plane. I forgot what I do. I was involved in assisting some [stunt] coordinating, so I was playing a part, but I was also in charge of hiring the right people and letting them know this is our next stunt gag and everything else. And I remember Jason had to jump off the bridge. I was so involved in all that and I forgot what I was doing in there. But people send me pictures: Oh, yeah, I played that character. I think I got shot by him.
You’ve died at his hands so many times, it becomes a blur after a certain point. In the past two films with him, were there times where Jason said, “This is too much for me. What you’re proposing is out of character for me?” Or: “Let’s amp things up, Eddie.”
Oh, he wanted to amp things up all the time. And if he says, Nah, I don’t want to do it, there’s always a good reason. Maybe it just didn’t make sense at that moment, because the script gets revised so many times by the time you start shooting it. Then it gets rewritten again when you begin shooting because now we’re realizing, We should understand why this is happening. Jason, as a good actor himself, will say, “Well, why would I do that and then go do this? It doesn’t make sense.”
So then David and him talk about it and they said, “You know what? I get it. We’ll scratch that, you do this instead.”
He’s thinking like an action choreographer himself.
Yeah, of course. I mean, he’s LeBron. When he starts, when he gets on set, he’s that guy. He needs to know what this guy would do throughout the whole film.
Jason’s films are filled with him using interesting, unexpected items to bludgeon or kill people. I wondered if you got enmeshed in that process at all and were like, “Hey, what about using this?” And maybe if you could take me through one of those situations.
There’s fights that we did on The Beekeeper and these weapons that he was dissembling. He says, “Well, since I took this shotgun, why don’t I just shove it on this guy’s throat like this?”
And then David would go, “I like that.”
And we look at, “Hey, effects, you’re going to have mold this and this and that,” and all of a sudden they’re working hard to get that mold piece prosthetic made.
I mean, things like that just happen all the time. “Hey, there’s a chain hanging; I’m going to hang a guy.” Boom, bring in the riggers, put a harness on this guy. We’re going to bring him up. Instead of a real chain, put a fake chain on him.
It’s just so many things that happen on set, like I said. Once you actually get in there, more ideas come. And then some of the ideas said, “Well, I can’t do that if this is there.” So what are we going to do? “Well, that’s a heavy piece of machinery, we can’t move it. All right, so now we have to rechoreograph everything and eliminate certain things, but let’s add this.”
So you got to be thinking a lot on your feet. Like David says, bring all your tools to set because you never know what he’s going to ask you for; you just better be ready for it.
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