Street Fighter Star Opens Up About The ‘Responsibility’ Of Playing Ryu As An Asian Actor
One of the most exciting upcoming action movies coming out this fall is the new take on Street Fighter. It includes all your favorite players from the video game, including Ryu, who will be played by Andrew Koji. The actor has a personal reason why winning the big part means a lot to him.
Ryu is a Japanese lead character who’s been a big part of the fighting game since the beginning. Here’s what Andrew Koji said about his history with Street Fighter:
I wasn’t very good at the game, growing up. I was a button-basher. I found it really hard. But being an Asian dude growing up in the West, I’d always play as Ryu because he was the one that was like me.
Japanese-English actor Andrew Koji was actually born in 1987, which is the same year Capcom first launched the game in arcades. When the actor was a kid, as he explained to Empire, he didn’t think he was very skilled at winning, but getting to play an Asian character meant a lot to him. So, when it came to getting to play the role in the movie, he wanted to do right by Ryu. In his words:
My task was to try and bring as much depth and nuance as possible. Ryu’s fighting style is more karate, so I was training and studying Shotokan karate as well as judo, jujitsu, and kickboxing.
Andrew Koji is a talented martial artist who competed in taekwondo and Shaolin kung fu early in his life, but in order to embody the role of Ryu, he learned some new styles. As he added:
For the physical side, me, Andrew and Callina trained together every day, six days a week, for six weeks straight. I felt like I had something to prove. I think a lot of us did, as we were given an opportunity with this movie to step up into a position we had never been in before. So I think we all felt that responsibility.
As he said, he trained closely with Callina Liang, who plays another popular character, Chun-Li, on a pretty rigorous schedule.
Andrew Koji started in Hollywood as a stunt double, notably in Fast & Furious 6. He was also famously in the Cinemax series Warrior for three seasons, the G.I. Joe spinoff Snake Eyes as Storm Shadow and Bullet Train with Brad Pitt. But Ryu is an icon, and it means a lot to him to do right by the Asian video game character with his portrayal.
Koji’s Ryu will get the chance to go up against his main rival in the game, Ken Masters, who is played by Noah Centineo. Also notably in the cast is Cody Rhodes as Guile, 50 Cent as Balrog, Jason Momoa as Blanka and David Dastmalchian as M. Bison. You can check out the Street Fighter trailer below:
Street Fighter was previously made into a movie in 1994 starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Colonel William F. Guile. Hong Kong actor Byron Mann played Ryu, alongside the likes of Ming-Na Wen, Kylie Minogue and Raúl Juliá. While the movie turned a profit back then, critics panned the film, and it earned an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes by critics and 20% by audiences.
With the recent Mortal Kombat movies, we certainly wonder how this new potential franchise will stack up. You can see Street Fighter in theaters on October 16.
