Wu Jing

Wu Jing came up through wushu and the Hong Kong action industry, and for two decades his filmography reads like a specialist's rather than a star's. Tai Chi II in 1996, television in Legend of Dagger Lee and Eternity: A Chinese Ghost Story, then a run of hard-edged crime and martial-arts pictures: Jack in SPL: Kill Zone, Fatal Contact, Invisible Target, Legendary Assassin, City Under Siege. He was hired for what his body could do, which is a good living and a low ceiling.

Then he built his own vehicle. He directed and starred in Wolf Warrior in 2015, and it worked well enough that Wolf Warrior 2 followed in 2017 with Leng Feng promoted to full-scale national action hero. The films are patriotic in a way that is inseparable from why they connected, and pretending otherwise misreads the whole career: what happened next was that he became a fixture of the biggest Chinese blockbusters of the era.

The Wandering Earth and its sequel gave him a science-fiction franchise as Liu Peiqiang. The Battle at Lake Changjin and its second part gave him a war epic. The Climbers, My People My Country and My Country My Parents put him in the national-anniversary ensemble pictures. Meg 2: The Trench in 2023 was the English-language crossover, and Ride On the same year let him work in a lighter key. Blades of the Guardians, dated 2026, is still ahead.

Very few actors have made that jump from stunt-capable supporting player to the top of an industry. He did it by directing himself when nobody else would.