Iko Uwais

Iko Uwais, born Uwais Qorny in Jakarta in 1983, began training in pencak silat at ten under his grandfather H. Achmad Bunawar, a silat master who founded his own school. In 2005 he won the national championship in the Silat Demonstration category, which is the relevant detail: he came out of a discipline that is judged on how legible the movement is, not just on whether it works.

That is the whole argument for him as a screen performer. Silat is fought inside arm's reach, elbows and knees and wrist locks, and it cannot be faked with fast cutting because the exchanges are continuous. Merantau in 2009 introduced him, and The Raid and The Raid 2 built entire films around holding the camera still and letting a real fighter finish a sequence. He choreographs as well as performs, which is why his best scenes have the shape of an argument: an opening position, an escalation, an answer.

Hollywood noticed and then mostly wasted him. He is a brief appearance as Razoo Quin-Fee in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the asset Li Noor in Mile 22, a fighter in Snake Eyes and Expend4bles, and Oka Tedjo in Stuber. Kai Jin in the Netflix series Wu Assassins and its film Fistful of Vengeance gave him a lead in English but not much of a character. The Indonesian work stayed better: Headshot in 2016 and The Night Comes for Us in 2018 are as brutal as action cinema gets.