Actor on playing the white villain in Hong Kong film, and how he spotted a ‘bad guy’ niche to fill

Philippe Joly has died opposite Andy Lau, Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, John Cusack and boyhood hero Jean-Claude Van Damme since moving to Hong Kong

In one of his first films, Frenchman was only allowed one take and got danger money – ‘Well, it’s explosives’, they said; now his goal is to snare better roles

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Multilingual French-Russian actor Philippe Joly looked for a niche to fill in Hong Kong film, and quickly realised he had the face of a “bad guy” rather than a romantic lead. Since then he’s “died a lot”, he says. Photo: Tory Ho

Published: 8:15am, 18 Jul 2019Updated: 7:38pm, 18 Jul 2019

“I die a lot!” says Philippe Joly. Most often, says the French-Russian resident of Hong Kong, he gets shot in the head, but he’s also been impaled and eaten by a monster.

It’s all in a day’s work for Joly, who plays the archetypal Western villain in Hong Kong movies, and has appeared with the likes of Chow Yun-fat and Andy Lau Tak-wah. His latest big screen outing is in The White Storm 2: Drug Lords, which opened on July 16.

The former start-up entrepreneur, who lives in Mui Wo, Lantau Island, says he brings the same approach to developing his acting career as he did to running companies. “I started to look at what is the demand, what is the niche, how can I fill that niche … Like a business person. Then I realised that my face is not the romantic lead, my face is the bad guy. So the niche you need to fill is the bad guy,” Joly says.

While he’s far from villainous in person, it’s true that if the camera loves some people, it makes Joly look alarmingly mean, and casting in Hong Kong, he says, is firstly visual: “Does this guy look right?”

Hong Kong-based actor Philippe Joly plays Russian boss Mogilov in 2019 film Abduction opposite Andy On. “I die a lot!” he says of his film roles thus far. Photo: courtesy of Philippe Joly

Curating a look that makes you recognisable and gives you an edge visually “doesn’t get you cast, but it gets you selected to see what else you’ve got”, he says.