Jet Li

Jet Li came to film as a martial artist first, and his early Chinese pictures, Shaolin Temple among them, are credited with reviving the kung fu film and with sending a generation of tourists to the actual monastery. What followed in Hong Kong is one of the great runs in action cinema. Across the early 1990s he was making several films a year, most of them good and a few of them permanent: the Once Upon a Time in China series, Fist of Legend, Tai Chi Master, The Bodyguard from Beijing, Last Hero in China, Kung Fu Cult Master.

The thing that separates him is legibility. He moves faster than almost anyone who has been filmed doing this, but the shapes stay clean, so a director can hold a wide shot and let the audience read every strike. His face does almost nothing while it happens. That stillness is why his best roles are about restraint rather than rage: Fearless and Hero are both, in different ways, about a fighter deciding to stop.

Hollywood took him in 1998, cast him as the villain in Lethal Weapon 4, and then spent a decade struggling to find him a character. Romeo Must Die, Kiss of the Dragon and The One are star vehicles with no interior; Unleashed is the one that actually asked him to act. He went home for The Warlords, Ocean Heaven and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, and by the time of the Expendables films and Mulan in 2020 he was being used as a signature rather than a lead.