Hong Kong martial arts film icon Sammo Hung on his career, stars including Donnie Yen, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan – and eating
- The recipient of the 2024 Hong Kong Film Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award has been involved in more than 200 films over the course of a stellar career
There was a time when Sammo Hung Kam-bo, one of the world’s great martial arts film stars, and, for a long time the only overweight one, was slender enough to play Sun Wukong, the fabled character also known as Monkey King. But that was when he was around 12 years old.
Hung was training under Peking opera master Yu Jim-yuen at the time, and his itineraries often saw him shuttling between film sets – where he would work as a child actor or an extra – and the Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park (or Lai Yuen, as it is more commonly called), where he would take part in acrobatic performances with his fellow apprentices.
Hung was always supposed to warm up, exercise, and practise for an hour before putting on make-up and taking the stage. But there was a time, when Hung was shooting the film The Crisis (1964), that he arrived late and had to head straight for make-up and then perform.
“Amitabha!”, Hung shouted in character, before climbing up three tables stacked on top of each other and then somersaulting back to the ground. He hurt his leg, was in great pain, but Yu ignored his pleas and Hung finished the show limping.
“In the two months that followed,” Hung, now 72, recalls, “I wasn’t able to train at all. I was just sitting around and eating. I happened to be going through my adolescent growth spurt and my weight ballooned as a result.”
It is certainly rare for a martial arts actor as venerated as Hung to be his size, especially back in his prime.
