I never wanted to be an actress. I am a martial arts fighter.
Martial arts is a life journey. One of the things my teacher taught me a long time ago was that everyone’s path to the mastery of a certain system is different. Some people’s path is a very direct route, where others might wind back and forth if you are injured or something.
You can use martial arts to tell a different story. Ang Lee used martial arts in ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ to talk about love.
I was really interested in doing a martial arts movie, but maybe exploring ideas that maybe you wouldn’t think to explore in a martial arts movie.
I did ballet, piano and all that – my brother did martial arts, my passion.
I studied martial arts before I studied dance.
There are two kinds of magic. If you think of it like martial arts, there’s sparring, where you are doing it with a partner, and the other is kata, where you’re doing an exposition for the audience.
As a child, I couldn’t afford going to the gym, so I started doing pull-ups, push-ups, suryanamaskar, dand baithak and other forms of yoga. I also trained in martial arts and practiced freehand exercises.
I had always considered myself a martial artist who fights rather than a fighter who learned martial arts – although I probably flowed between those two categories over the years.
I don’t like all the cheating that’s going in mixed martial arts. I don’t know what percentage of high-level fighters do it, but I think it would be a significant amount.
Different martial arts have ways of showing you how to control an opponent and put him down, but jiu-jitsu is the king of how to finish somebody. And that’s what I love about it.
Once you are trained in the international martial arts, your body and mind become toned permanently. You can take on any action role.
I can’t imagine my life without martial arts. I would be a different person.
I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style – the best sword-style of martial arts. And the tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.
More entertainers should come forward to support sports. I’d love to see Akshay Kumar in a film on Indian martial arts.
The true game of mixed martial arts is putting your wrestling in there, putting your striking in there, but also being deceiving – hiding behind your punches if you’re wrestling and hiding behind your wrestling if you’re punching. It’s just a matter of blending it all together.
For me, the martial arts is a search for something inside. It’s not just a physical discipline.
I love my martial arts and action movies. They give another dimension to the acting world: the emotional plus the physical.
Martial arts will always be a part of my life. I started when I was five, and if I don’t open a school one day or teach or manage, I would still practice to stay in shape.
If you want to see great mixed martial arts, tune in when I fight. If you want to see drama and all of that stuff, you guys can go watch ‘Bachelors in Paradise.’ They’ll give you enough drama you can want to watch.
I’m a martial arts buff, so anything martial arts.
I’m trained in mixed martial arts. I started when I was 14 and did my first competition at 18. It was a grappling competition against all guys a weight category above me, and I got first place.
I have three things I really, really want to do. I want to do aerial trapeze, I want to do martial arts, and I want to learn Russian. And, because of my life, I’m not able to do any of these.
The thought has crossed my mind to quit even dealing with organized mixed martial arts in general and just fight my own fights, however I feel like.
I see martial arts as moving forms of meditation. When you’re sparring or drilling techniques, you can’t think of anything else.
I do martial arts mostly. But if I am bored, or my body is aching, I swim or go the gym. I can sometimes be doing cardio on the treadmill, kick boxing, stretching, dance, whatever I feel like. I just make sure I have something to do every day but no particular set routine.
I have always been a martial arts fighter; it goes to back when I was eighteen. I was competing on the circuit, but when you’re performing, you tend to pull punches because you don’t want to hurt anyone.
The physical DNA has always been part of our family. My dad was a good boxer and gymnast; my mum is a ballroom dancer, and my brother does martial arts.
I started training in martial arts when I was 7 years old. I got my first black belt at 13.
I’m a martial artist. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was three years old, and fighting since i was 15 and that’s all I know how to do. The money is just a bonus. It’s a bonus for me. I think my real job is teaching martial arts, it’s what I love to do.
I’ve been doing Tai Chi on and off for 20 years. The fundamentals of all martial arts are the same.
I do mixed martial arts, mainly kickboxing.
Back when I was maybe 19, guys would go, ‘I can kick your butt!’ So I had a few showdowns. To my advantage, I learned martial arts, and what you really learn is not to fight.
When I was younger I did karate and martial arts, and I think it’s really cool for girls to have those kinds of abilities.
Mixed martial arts, UFC, or what have you, I don’t think it has anything to do with rankings. It doesn’t have to do with ‘this guy beat this guy so he deserves a title shot.’ It might be like that every once in a while, but this is entertainment and the two biggest names – the best story.
You get a world-class athlete like Hershel Walker, who was a Heisman trophy winner and did some amazing things, but he had a martial arts background. He did kickboxing. He had a combat sports background. It was just rekindling that training and that martial arts workout ethic. He got back into it and did quite well.
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is my favorite full-length ballet, Sergei Prokofiev’s breathtaking score a favorite composition of music. As a student of martial arts, I loved drawing my sword in defense of my Capulet kin.
Martial arts is what pulled me through tough times, and it is one of the reasons for my happiness.
I grew up in a martial arts gym surrounded by men and boys, and I pretty much call myself a tomboy.
Martial arts are inherently both incredibly impressive and incredibly beautiful. And that’s my female nature, maybe, and my instinct, to make things beautiful.
My father watched all the ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ that you could imagine, along with the martial arts. So I was into all that as a youngster, and I always rooted for the bad guy.
You know, martial arts is all about respect and discipline and it’s always been about that. But again, people are starting to forget that, people are missing that, and this is where I believe I can help and it’s good for our sport.
My first experience of doing martial arts was weird, real traditional, strange smell with incense burning. We did a lot of bowing, it was a lot of path of least resistance and go with the flow… Really good stuff for when you’re at a young age.
When I started training martial arts, I learned about respect.
I used to love martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme. In one of Van Damme’s movies, he would break a pine tree. I would kick banana trees because I used to live on a farm. My father would get mad at me because I would break all of the banana trees around.
You see me. What you see is what you get. You get real martial arts, you get real fighting, you get a real warrior mentality. Some people aren’t mature enough to handle it.
My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He’s Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them.
My becoming an actor wasn’t planned. My interest always lied in sports such as football, martial arts, gymnastics and dance.
I did martial arts and karate for eight years when I was growing up.
I grew up learning martial arts in Korea; my dad actually brought in an Olympic instructor to teach me as a teenager.
When I was growing up, I used to watch ‘Power Rangers’ and ‘Ninja Turtles.’ It seemed like every movie had someone doing martial arts in it, so I would go around punching and kicking trees.
Fighting is an expression. It’s a form of speech, and that’s why they call it martial arts. It’s an art.
The thing about mixed martial arts is you have to know every single martial art in the world or you’re at a disadvantage. So, there’s so much to learn. I have to know wrestling. I have to know kick boxing. I have to know boxing. I have to know karate.
Martial arts is something you can learn or pick up and think you could do really well.
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which is a poem by Robert Frost.
I have a talent for coming up with an analogy about martial arts training for everything. It’s because training to improve your martial arts skills and training to step into a cage and fight another person teaches you a lot about… everything.
‘Ashes of Time’ was my third film, and as a young director at that point, it’s not very often that you have the chance to make a big martial arts film, so of course I jumped at this opportunity.
