As the Marvel movie Shang-Chi: Legend of the Ten Rings continues to impress in theaters, the movie’s star actor Simu Liu posted a video showing the work that goes into the incredible action sequences of the film. This particularly impressive bus stunt includes running across the top of a bus, leaping off of it, and catching onto the side of the bus (therefore being slammed into the bus’s door) while hanging on a wire. Simu Liu said the following about this action sequence and all of the stuntwork in Shang Chi: “Every breathtaking stunt in our movie is the result of months of previsualization, choreography, rehearsal, rigging and testing before we get to the shoot day. And as far as stunt teams went, we had the very best in the world”.
Liu also discussed the particular stunt move that was shown in the video, acknowledging that “stunts like this baseball slide off the front of a bus felt straightforward in rehearsal, but [they were] a whole different ballgame once you factored in the hydraulics and the wind machines”.
Liu Yifei, the actress who played Mulan last year, also has given fans a glimpse of the endurance that’s required for stunt work and wire-work. In the video that she shared on Instagram, her character Mulan is running up and on the side of a wall during a fight, reaching impossible heights with the help of her “chi” in the movie (and some well-placed wires in reality). According to Yifei, she was “thankful for hard shell knee pads” after she “hit the beam with [her] knees”. She also thanked her stunt team and stunt coordinators for their work.
Even though combat and stuntwork take weeks (often months) of training, and injuries are common, actors often express happiness when discussing their training process. As Simu Liu put it, “When you insist on practical effects, you pay the human price. The bumps and scrapes add up and in my case resulted in my knee swelling up to the size of a tennis ball…Still, they had to drag me off that bus; I wanted to go over and over again, until it was perfect, and then some. I loved every second of it.”
