Kelly Wagner, casting director for the movie Tekken has told Sci Fi that in casting the team looked for actors who could fight and also act so to avoid hammy acting and poor fight choreography and finally break the curse of video game adaptations, that so far have never really transfered well to film."One of the most frustrating things is when you're watching a movie, and it's so obvious that your actor's not doing the physicality," said Wagner. Jin Kazama, played by Jon Foo, is the lead character and thus had to epitomise the casting strategy. Foo has a histroy in Thai martial-arts cinema. "We found him in Thailand," Wagner said. "He sent a tape in from Thailand that he had filmed of himself, and then we flew him out here for a screen test."
For some of the supporting roles, fighting seems to have worryingly been put on an higher pedistall than acting"We used a lot of real martial artists in that," Wagner said. "We used Cung Le, who's a UFC fighter. We used a bunch of martial artists that didn't need to have as much of acting roles as they did, but our lead, Jin, had to be able to do both. That movie was pretty tough to cast because there was a good five or six roles. The leading roles needed to be really stellar actors, because it's a drama piece, but at the same time, we wanted to find people who could legitimately do their martial arts."
so is this a good sign or will Tekken suffer from the same shortcomings as previous adaptaions such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter ?
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