Jean-Claude Van Damme, actor and martial artist: “I love playing villains, but classy villains”
Jean-Claude Van Damme has not only played invincible heroes throughout his film career, but also the part of the villain which have often gone unnoticed.
Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg (1960), better known by his stage name Jean-Claude Van Damme, is a Belgian actor and martial artist. From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, he was one of Hollywood’s biggest icons in action and martial arts films.
Although he rose to fame and remained at the top for several years thanks to his many hero roles, Van Damme has also portrayed a number of villains throughout his career. These are parts he has felt quite comfortable with and a distinctive trait that sets him apart from other stars such as Sylvester Stallone.
A taste for classy villains since the beginning of his career
“I love playing a villain, but a classy villain.” Van Damme has expressed this sentiment in various interviews over the years, a perspective that aligns with the evolution of his filmography and can now be traced through retrospectives and career profiles.
Over the course of his long career on the silver screen, Van Damme has played fearless heroes such as Colonel Guile in Street Fighter and Max Walker in Timecop. However, it is often overlooked that from the very beginning of his career, the Belgian actor first made his mark playing villains.
The role that catapulted Van Damme to stardom was Frank Dux in ‘Bloodsport’, a supposedly biographical film that followed Dux’s exploits in an underground martial arts tournament in Hong Kong. However, his first significant film role was Ivan Kraschinsky in ‘No Retreat, No Surrender’.
Kraschinsky was a skilled karate expert and boxer working for a criminal organization that made life miserable for the protagonist’s family. In this role, Van Damme stood out for his immaculate hairstyle, cold and imposing presence, and the elegant suits his character wore in several scenes.
Another early villain role came in the late 1980s. In ‘Black Eagle’, Van Damme played Andrei, a dangerous KGB agent and hand-to-hand combat specialist. The film capitalized on Cold War tensions to deliver a spy thriller set in Malta. As such, Van Damme sported a varied and fashionable wardrobe that highlighted his physique and personal style, including a tuxedo reminiscent of James Bond.
Over time, his fame declined, as did that of other stars in the genre, largely due to waning interest in over-the-top action films. Nevertheless, in 2012 he rose from the ashes with a new villain role in a major Hollywood production: Jean Vilain in ‘The Expendables 2’. In this film, he portrayed a dangerous international arms dealer seeking to obtain Cold War plutonium to manufacture dirty bombs.
That same year, he also delivered one of the biggest surprises of his career with ‘Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’. Here, he played a darker, villainous version of Luc Deveraux, the former hero of Universal Soldier, reimagined as the leader of a military cult reminiscent of Colonel Kurtz from ‘Apocalypse Now’. His deep philosophical reflections and even his shaved head were deliberate parallels to the character portrayed by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s film.
In short, among the great action stars of the 1980s and 1990s, Van Damme may be the one who has shown the least fear in experimenting and stretching his range through the roles he has chosen. While he achieved global recognition for his heroic performances, he also stood out for bringing to life a number of memorable antagonists who were more than just punching bags, proving that he could command the screen even outside traditional leading-man roles.
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