Jean-Claude Van Johnson, a surprisingly funny Amazon-produced action-comedy, follows an over-the-hill movie actor-cum-international spy who comes out of retirement to win back his ex-lover, Vanessa. The show wouldn’t work at all without 57-year-old Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays a parodic version of himself: a self-involved but charming older star who is still the best at what he does.
But the character Van Damme is most eager to talk about during our recent phone conversation isn’t his espionage-trained alter ego: it’s Filip, who appears in Jean-Claude Van Johnson’s pilot episode for barely more than a minute. Filip has a pipsqueak voice and a wispy beard, but he otherwise looks exactly like, well . . . Jean-Claude Van Damme.
For Van Damme, this second throwaway role—a Timecop-loving janitor—is not just a disposable gag, but an “honest” character with genuine affection for Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. “Filip’s a real fan,” Van Damme says. “He has real love.”
Van Damme’s affection for his goofy bit part may suggest that he has grown more comfortable in his skin—and with self-deprecation—as he’s aged. But the actor, who enjoyed a run in the 80s and 90s as the Belgian answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger in movies like Kickboxer and Double Impact, still struggles with questions of authenticity, even when considering recent roles.
He describes the period from 1984 to 2013—which includes the height of his fame—as a period in which he was “not a real actor.” In fact, according to Van Damme, he mostly spent the mid-to-late 80s selling his “amazing legs”: ”Nobody had legs like mine, in terms of kicking and the speed of them.”
At the time, a truthful Van Damme performance was one that showed the impact of his body “when I touched the other actors.” He credits Bloodsport cinematographer David Worth, editor Carl Kress, and producer Menahem Golan with helping him to establish, through the use of master shots and unbroken long takes, that Van Damme was “the real deal”—a flexible martial-arts master who performed his own fight choreography. You couldn’t fake that kind of performance with extreme close-ups or hyperactive editing. ”When you’re good, you can put the camera on the floor and shoot all the scenes and move on,” Van Damme explains.
But like many now-middle-aged 80s action stars, Van Damme has struggled to age gracefully. He made career decisions he now regrets, like turning down a role in Chinese action blockbuster Wolf Warrior II, the current record-holder for the highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. But he’s also found satisfaction in everything from starring as himself in the 2015 Hong Kong comedy Jian Bing Man to directing himself in the still-unreleased psychological action-drama Full Love—a film that Van Damme shot in 2008 and 2012, but is still working on as of this year. For that film, Van Damme disoriented his cast by shooting scenes out of sequence. “One scene they’d tell each other, ‘I love you,’ the next they’d have to kill each other,” Van Damme jokes. He admits that this approach made his co-workers, including famed cinematographer Douglas Milsome (Full Metal Jacket, The Last of the Mohicans) want to kill him. But “maybe we got a more honest response from [the actors],” Van Damme says rhetorically.
Van Damme was also shaken by a transformative experience in 2003, while working with Hong Kong action legend Ringo Lam. They were making a film called In Hell—one of a handful of superior, under-seen, later-period Van Damme films trapped in V.O.D. limbo.
Van Damme does not romanticize this era of his career: “I was in the V.O.D. business for a time, right? With all due respect to the people in that industry. But my career was going down.” But In Hell was also the first film where he says he “became a truthful actor.”
Before taking on this role, Lam (of City on Fire and Full Alert fame) took Van Damme aside and told him that he would be playing a “more truthful” person than he was in real life—“nicer to people, more polite.” Van Damme did his best to embody the role—and got so immersed that he felt like he really was his character for months after In Hell wrapped. He could feel a difference in his posture, his gait, and his mannerisms. “It’s almost like a therapy, for me to act,” Van Damme says now.
As Van Damme reaches for greater truth in his acting, he still prides himself for regularly working out three hours at a time at the gym. He shows off the results of his labor throughout Jean-Claude Van Johnson’s first season, whether he’s doing his signature splits or grimacing during a well-timed pratfall. In that sense, the series displays a refreshing mix of “amazing legs”-era Van Damme and “truthful performer”-period Van Damme. ”If I had to stop show business tomorrow . . . that’s the type of show I’d like to be remembered from,” Van Damme says. “That’s my last painting. I think. I hope I’m an O.K. actor.”
