Mark Dacascos FIGHT ACTION ACTOR
Report by Carl Fox
With more than sixty credits to his name (including his big screen lead debut Only the Strong, the live action adaptation of Manga series Crying Freeman, French arthouse hit Brotherhood of the Wolf, Craig Hamann’s critically acclaimed Boogie Boy and his directorial debut Showdown in Manila) and a career spanning nearly thirty years, Mark Dacascos’ name has been synonymous with martial arts movies since the early nineties.
One for continual personal development, Mark’s martial arts foundations are rooted in his father’s own style of Wun Hop Kuen Do. Mark says, “My father teaches Wun Hop Kuen Do, which today would be classed as a mixed martial arts, but as you know in a real fight, everything is a mixed martial art. You don’t think, ‘I’m going to do this style,’ or, ‘I’m going to do that style,’ you just fight. So my father’s style has always been that when we train, he will stop the students and tell them not to put their training clothes on. If they have a suit on, he will tell them to just come out and this is how we are going to do it. So for practical restrain training, we will go out and fight between cars or we go into an alley or the side of a hill. That’s my base and that’s what I’ve done all my life and when I did Cradle 2 the Grave, I thought it would be good to revisit the Wu Shu I did in my youth. I love learning different martial arts and I’d never studied Muay Thai before so it gave me a great professional reason to learn as much as I could before shooting started.”
With controversy surrounding the fictional encounter between Mike Moh’s Bruce Lee and Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood, had it not been for mutual respect, Mark’s father Al Dacascos and Bruce Lee could have fought each other in real life over 40 years ago. “My father opened up his own martial arts school in San Francisco and like Bruce, had begun teaching Caucasians. He was threatened in a similar way that Bruce was and also had to take similar action as he did. The Chinese clan then tried to create bad blood between my father and Bruce, spreading rumours that each was calling the other down. They circulated the story that my father claimed that he taught Bruce everything he knew, in the hope that both men would lose their tempers and put each other out of business. When my father approached Bruce at the Long Beach International Tournament in California and pointed out that he had never called him down, Bruce slapped him on the back, told him to forget it and they shook hands. “
With Mark’s father Al forming a friendship with Bruce Lee, Mark’s mother Malia Bernal and Linda Lee became friends, just after Bruce passed away, when Linda went on a world tour in memory of her late husband. One of the producers of the tour asked Malia, who was one of the top female competitors on the martial arts circuit in America, and Al, who was a top ten fighter and one of the only Kung Fu guys to compete in tournaments at that time, to go on this tour with Linda and they became good friends. Mark says, “After Bruce Lee passed away, Linda, knowing that Bruce respected my father’s art and skill, championed my father for the role of Bruce Lee in a biographical movie back in the 70’s, but the movie never got made but my father was Linda’s first choice. The movie was made twenty years later when my friend Jason Scott Lee played Bruce Lee. Linda wrote a book called ‘Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew.’ At the beginning, in the acknowledgements, she thanks two martial artists; Jhoon Rhee and Al Dacascos – Bruce’s ‘fellow martial artists.’ That made me so excited and so happy. I’m like a million martial artists who have been so inspired by Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, my Father, my Mother – those were my martial arts heroes when I was growing up. Bruce Lee was the first Asian guy that I saw kick butt on the screen and today, he’s still one of my heroes.”
One of my favourite martial arts movies of all time is 1993’s Only the Strong, where Mark’s former Green Beret and capoeira practitioner Louis Stevens returns to his old neighbourhood to find his old high school overrun by gangs and drug dealers. With permission from his former principle Mr Kerrigan, he takes the school’s worst batch of students, teaches them the Brazilian martial art of capoeira and tries to steer them away from trouble by giving them respect, hope and a sense of self belief and self worth. Capoeira, with its graceful and almost balletic movements, is tailor-made for the screen, yet Only the Strong is still the only martial arts movie to feature it as the main fighting style but that could change in the near future. Though an Only the Strong sequel is out of the question due to legal issues, fans of the movie will be pleased to know that Mark, along with his wife Julie, is working on a new Capoeira movie. He says, “I have been talking to Amen Santo, my friend, who is also my Capoeira teacher, and we did Only the Strong together. If we were to do another Capoeira movie with the same team in a studio, I don’t know if we would be able to get the grit, the sweat and the feel that I would like to show in the next Capoeira movie. Amen Santo, my wife and I are working on a script and we want to shoot everything, apart from a few scenes, in Brazil. I would like to show Capoeira that is actually done by the true Capoeiraistas. When I did Only the Strong, I was taking Capoeira, not for the movie, but for myself. I started training in November, not even knowing that there was a Capoeira movie in the works. Then at the end of January, my manager Cathryn called me and told me there was an audition for a Capoeira movie and I should go for it. What I would like to show is the Capoeiraistas who have been doing it for decades. We don’t want it to be a sequel, but the people who saw Only the Strong the first time around, we want to do something that would have grown up with them. We’re doing a movie for the same audience as Only the Strong but they’ve grown up now.”
Well known for being an incredibly nice guy and easy to work with, Mark has recently appeared in Lucky Day, a film by Academy Award winner Roger Avary, whom I had the opportunity to speak to a few years ago, just prior to filming starting on the Robert Zemekis performance-capture-laden feature Beowulf. At the time, he was working on adapting the Richard La Plante book Mantis for the small screen and I touted Mark for a starring role. Avary said of the idea at the time, “I wouldn’t rule Mark out of starring in it. Mark is also a close friend of mine and I have wanted to work with him again, ever since I produced a movie that he was in called Boogie Boy. He is honestly one of the nicest human beings I have ever met and could kick my ass and rip my throat out in seventeen different ways. I don’t think his unique talents have been utilised properly enough. He has a lot more depth in him and I think that he has been slightly misused over time. I would love an opportunity to pull out, what I know, is inside of him.”
Mark’s last big screen outing was as the bald-headed, sushi-loving Japanese assassin Zero in John Wick 3, which has won him a new generation of fans, some of who may not have seen him on screen before. Hired by Asia Kate Dillon’s Adjudicator, Zero has the task of destroying not only a fellow assassin but one which he has a tremendous amount of respect for. As Mark explains in an electronic press kit interview from Lionsgate, “Zero, at least in his mind, though he loves John, he feels like he’s on par with him because he loves everything Mr. Wick is about. His style. His grace. His class. His efficiency. How brutal and violent he is, but still a gentleman. He is the biggest fan-boy of John Wick there is. He’s probably learned from him through osmosis and reading stories and feels like if anyone is able to take out John, it is himself; Zero and there’s a certain honour to that. I mean, there’s a honour in going after John. Nobody else in his mind is worthy of that. Nobody loves John Wick more than Zero, so it should be Zero who takes John Wick out.”
Fresh from kicking seven shades of s#!t out of Keanu Reeves’ titular character in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, legendary martial arts actor Mark Dacascos will be making a rare UK appearance at London Comic Con Spring.
For your chance to meet Mr. Dacascos in person, get an autograph or even get a photograph with the man himself, head over to London Comic Con Spring at the Olympia London on Saturday 29th February and Sunday 1st March 2020
For more information and to book tickets, head over to www.londoncomicconspring.com