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| Scott Adkins and Nicole Deon in Reckless |
He’s known for full-on action films like One Shot and Take Cover, but in his most recent film, Reckless, Scott Adkins is doing things a little differently. He plays a man just released from prison who is looking for his share of the loot from a robbery gone wrong, but is perhaps a little too trusting of his former associates. The fights his fans love are still there, but there’s a lot of comedy, and a poignant dramatic scene in which his character catches up with the woman he hoped would wait for him.
“I just try and mix it up a bit,” Scott says when I ask him about this. “I mean, obviously I make a lot of action films and I have a fan base there. They expect the martial arts and everything. So that's always going to be in there for the most part, if I'm the lead. But this was an opportunity to do something that was a lot more comedic and more fun and a bit zany and a little bit out there. And, yeah, I like to mix it up and try different things.
“There's kind of a misconception about me, because I do so much martial arts stuff and so much action stuff, that I'm not an actor. I mean, obviously I do a lot of that, but the truth is, the first ever job I did was a martial arts film, and the second was Doctors on the BBC. I've been in EastEnders. I've been in Holby City. I've done British TV shows, so, you know, it depends on what the scene is. That scene called for a bit more reality in the emotional states. Obviously, you lean into that then.”
It's balanced with the banter all the way through with Nicole Deon. How did they develop their chemistry? It’s an enormous asset to the film
“We didn't have a lot of time, to be honest. We hit the ground running. I didn't meet her until the first day or the day before, doing some sort of fight rehearsal, but she was knocking around. But we cast the right girl for the job. You know, she understood the tone of the movie. She completely got it, and she's got a great personality and luckily the chemistry worked. If it didn't work, we would have been screwed. We were already in that situation. But a big part of that banter goes down to Stu Small, who wrote the script, because he writes that sort of British quirky dialogue so well, and Nicole really understood where he was coming from with it.”
I mention that I like it as a buddy movie which doesn’t get distracted by romance.
“Yeah, definitely. It's a buddy movie with a boy and a girl that aren't romantically entangled, which is kind of refreshing. I suppose it could go that way if there was a sequel, let's say, but we're not relying on it at all. And yeah, that was interesting.”
When it comes to the fighting, he’s supposed to have learned in prison and Nicole is supposed to be untrained.
“The funny thing is that I'm obviously the martial arts guy – although I learned martial arts in a very unorthodox way in this film – but it's kind of like you always have to explain how I got trained.” He laughs. “I'm always going to be doing martial arts because it's one of my films. But the funny thing is that through pretty much every entanglement, she ends up saving the day with no training. Just through sheer willpower, she gets the job done.”
She’s not a trained fighter herself, but he found her easy to work with.
“She didn't have to do that much, but she's done a lot of musical theatre, so she's probably dance trained. And really martial arts on film has got more in common with dance than real fighting. In many ways, it's choreography. That's all it is. We just make it look a bit more violent, and it does have violent consequences if you get something wrong. So does ice skating, you know what I mean? It's just a physical form of choreography.”
I seem to recall that he once hit Benedict Cumberbatch when choreography went wrong.
“I did,” he says, with a slightly embarrassed grin. “I hit him a bit hard with a sidekick to the chest, and I remember him bouncing off the banister and I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, I'm in trouble now.’ But he's a great guy and he took it in his stride and he was absolutely fine about it. So I was lucky. I did the same sort of thing to Robert Carlyle as well. I did a film called The Tournament, and I had to throw a grenade. I was upside down, doing a side somersault, and I threw it up instead of down because my world was inverted. I bounced this rubber grenade off his head and sent him home early.”
This film, thankfully, was incident-free.
“It was all good. I was doing most of the fighting with Mark Strange. He was great and he’s someone I trust.
“It was a fun set. The only problem was we just didn't have enough time. We shouldn't have been shooting a movie on that sort of schedule, but we all did. I was working with Jude Poyer, who's such an amazing, fine coordinator. I said to Jude, ‘Man, we need to do this properly one day.’ And then with pages and pages of dialogue, and you really only get two takes, three if you're lucky, you’ve just got to make sure you're prepared and get it on the first few takes, you know?
“I just enjoy to work. I love being on a film set. That's what I always wanted to do, so I always enjoy it. And yeah, it is hard, and sometimes tempers can break because it's such an intense environment, because you're always fighting against the clock. But I love it, and I feel like the more I do, the better I get as an actor and as a filmmaker. I just keep pushing forward and keep trying to get better. That's my approach.”
He’s recently made his first attempt at directing a feature.
“Brawler, yes. I’ve literally just come off a meeting with the editor It's all complete and we're in the process of editing it.”
It was a challenging shoot, he says.
“Obviously, if you're the lead actor and you're directing, it's hard to keep an eye not just on your own performance, but also everyone else's. And then if you throw in, on top of that, all the action and the fighting, which is so tiring, so energy sapping, to couple that with directing is a real extreme pursuit. I’m not sure if I'll be rushing to do it again.”
What was it that persuaded him that he wanted to do it this time?
“Well, I always wanted to do it because I started off as a filmmaker. I was the kid that made all the short films with their friends, you know, the local movie maker. And then acting became the thing and I put that to one side, but I always imagined I would direct. I just procrastinated for so long. And now here we are, we've done it. Brawler's the one. I put my money where my mouth is, and let's see what it's like.”
Another new venture for him has been lending his vocal talents to a Deadpool video game.
“Oh yeah, that was fun. That just came up out of the blue. They wanted me to do Omega Red, and I was happy to do it. It was good fun.”
He’s also recently worked with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on The Rip.
“That was a fantastic experience,” he says. “Again, I talked about acting, and I'm there not using my martial arts. It's fantastic to share the screen with some of Hollywood's best actors. It was a great experience for me and it was amazing to see how well it was received and how well it did on Netflix. And yeah, I couldn't be happier to be involved and I really am very thankful to the director to give me the opportunity, but also Matt and Ben for allowing me to be involved in such a great project, because it was down to them as much as Netflix and the director.
“Joe Carnahan [who directed The Rip] was a big fan of Avengement. He reached out to me afterwards and congratulated me on an amazing job, and he said he wanted to do something. It just came up that they were looking for someone to play Ben Affleck's brother, and so obviously I'm on that list just for looking like him. So as long as you can take care of the American accent, you know, you get the job.”
He’s pretty happy with how that turned out, but now he’s looking to the future.
“I’m quite excited about a movie coming out called Bedlam, which I think is going to be really good, and I’m just working away on my directorial début now. And I've got another film in about five weeks that I'll be shooting. It's an action martial arts film. Surprise, surprise.
“I just keep going and keep doing what I love to do. It keeps me young, because I'm forced to go to the gym and work out because there's another film coming, and it's part of my job. So I'm always training, not because I want to but because I have to. So I feel like that's why I'm looking okay for 49.”
He’s confident that, no matter the physical challenges, he’ll be staying in action for many years to come.
“Absolutely, I will keep going. Don't worry about that. I'm just getting started.”
