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FOR the
last few years, Michael Angarano has been concentrating
on independent films, so when he learned about the
Jackie Chan- Jet Li martial-arts adventure The Forbidden
Kingdom at a basketball game with his agent, he wasn’t
certain that would be the film for him. v “You never
know what you could be doing next,” says the 20-year-old
actor. “It was exciting, though it wasn’t something I
obsessed over. I knew just as well that it could not be
the next thing I would be doing. I wasn’t even thinking
about it too much until I had to screen test with Jackie
Chan.”
The
period adventure, sort of a Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon meets The Wizard of Oz, marks the first onscreen
pairing of the martial-arts masters. In the film, which
opened Friday, Angarano, who began his career as a model
at age 5, plays Jason, a nerdy
Boston
teenager who loves kung fu movies.
While
searching for some bootleg videos in a Chinatown
pawnshop, Jason makes a discovery that hurls him back to
ancient China, where he learns he must free the famous
Monkey King (Li), who has been turned into a statue by
the evil Jade War Lord (Collin Chou). Helping him in his
quest—and also teaching him how to fight—are the
wisecracking kung fu master Lu Yan (Chan) and the Silent
Monk (also Li). It’s only when he completes his task
that he can find his way home to Boston.
Exhaustive training
ANGARANO
had never done martial arts but was in good physical
shape because he’d just taken up running. Once in China,
he spent eight hours a day for two weeks learning
martial arts with renowned action choreographer Woo-Ping
Yuen (The Matrix trilogy, Crouching Tiger) and squeezing
in horseback-riding lessons whenever possible. Over the
seven-month shoot, his skills—and confidence—grew.
“It
actually worked out really well that the last 35 days of
filming was when we shot this huge climactic battle
sequence, where I do the majority of my fighting in the
movie,” Angarano says. “By that point, we had shot four
months already. I remember the first 50 days we were
shooting stuff in the Gobi Desert and all of these
locations. It was really kind of tough to make sense of
it all.”
Director
Rob Minkoff knows he was asking a lot of Angarano, who’s
been in Almost Famous, Lords of Dogtown and, more
recently, Snow Angels.
“He had
to do a lot of stuff in this movie,” Minkoff says. “He
had to pretty much carry the movie with two of the
biggest megasuperstars on the planet. He had to be able
to do kung fu, and then he had to go live in China for
seven months.”
Getting
noticed
MINKOFF
says he’d kept his eyes on Angarano for several years.
“I think
the performance that impressed me the most was Lords of
Dogtown,” he says of his star’s poignant turn as Sid,
the slightly built, hearing-impaired skateboarder, circa
1970. “I think he had a charm that lit up the screen.”
Angarano,
who is now in
Utah shooting Gentlemen Broncos, the latest comedy from
Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), says he’d have to be
Shakespeare to fully describe what it was like working
with Li and Chan. “They really took me under their wings
in a non-overwhelming sense,” he says. “They didn’t put
pressure on me. They made me feel the exact opposite and
made me feel good about what I was doing.” n |
