If asked to name the greatest action heroes of the 21st Century, the usual suspects – some of whom have been part of the list for decades – will invariably come up, but it’s long overdue for Scott Adkins to become part of the conversation.
He may have spent the majority of his career headlining hard-hitting martial arts movies that rarely see the inside of a theater, when it comes to combining ass-kicking abilities with genuine dramatic chops, he’s got to be deemed as one of the best – and perhaps the single most underrated – in the business.
On the surface, the prospect of seeing Adkins go toe-to-toe with Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4 is about as mouthwatering as it gets, but a lot of people aren’t even going to notice that he’s in the sequel at all. Buried under a mountain of prosthetics and a fat suit as over-the-hill High Table veteran Killa – complete with exaggerated German accent – the 46 year-old slips in under the radar to lay an inevitable claim for the best hand-to-hand scrap across all 169 minutes.
Speaking to The Wrap, though, Adkins doesn’t mind his biggest and most substantial part in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster coming at the price of his handsome visage being obscured, because he was thrilled to get in on the franchise regardless.
“I’ve been begging him to put me in a John Wick movie for a while now. and he finally ‘Yes, but there’s a catch.’ [Stahelski said] ‘You’re going to be in a [fat suit], playing this German head of the German Table.’ I actually relished the challenge and the opportunity to create such an amazingly evil, yet jolly character. I figured I’m going to have to go big. There’s no good being small in this [role]. This guy used to be [a big deal] back in the day, but he had since let himself go.”
It’s a small-but-memorable performance, of which there are many in John Wick: Chapter 4, and another reminder that even when he’s unrecognizable, Adkins still knows how to make an impression.
