Taming Action Roles

“It’s much bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Jean-Claude Van Damme says jokingly about the length of his name. “It looks better on the screen.” And with his current martial-arts movie, “Kickboxer,” it is the movie screen where the 1980 middleweight Full-Contact Karate World Champion is now on the attack.

Contending for a place in the action-adventure genre, the 28-year-old Belgian-born actor knows he has aligned himself against powerful adversaries. Still, Van Damme is not thrown off by the likes of Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris. He is going to be different. “Too much macho is no good,” he says in his heavy French accent. “They (the audience) want to see someone human.”

It was Van Damme’s prowess in shotokan karate that scored him his first starring role, a break that took three years to come.

“Nobody wanted me because my English wasn’t good and the only thing I had to show was the karate,” he says. Finally, the weight-trained Van Damme got a chance to show off his physique and his flexibility to producer Menahem Golan. Golan was impressed and handed him the script to “Bloodsport.” But Van Damme remembers more about the meeting: “He saw in my eyes that I was hungry.”

A young man with a successful gymnasium business in his native Brussels, Van Damme decided in 1981 to try for his childhood dream and, as the cliche goes, he sold everything and struck out for a new title: star.

“Everybody, even my father, was very upset that I wanted to go to America to be a movie star. It was very difficult when I came to this country.” Van Damme recalls having to take odd jobs such as a bouncer in Newport Beach and as a pizza deliveryman.

But even now, with three movies under his black belt and a fourth in production, Van Damme is still hungry. “I’m in the same state now when Arnold was when he did ‘Pumping Iron,’ ” he says leaning forward, serious. “I have a lot to do to make it. . . . Now that I’m here, I have to keep going. I have to be better.”