Ray Park

You rarely see his face. Darth Maul is red and black paint, Snake Eyes is a full mask, Toad is green make-up and a tongue. So you watch him the way you would watch a dancer: how he stands before the fight starts, weight back, knees soft, then the sudden spring that the camera has to catch up with. He competed in wushu for Great Britain from 1991 to 1996, and it shows. Where another stunt man would throw a punch, Park puts a flip, and the flip lands on the beat.

He came in through the stunt door, with small parts in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), and the stunt coordinator Nick Gillard put him up for Maul in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). The voice was dubbed; the duel is still the part of that film people talk about. X-Men (2000) gave him Toad, his first substantial speaking role with his own face on show, and the film did not know what to do with him. Our review found much of the cast waiting for something to do, and Toad waits with them. Then came Snake Eyes in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), Edgar in Heroes (2009–2010), and a cameo as Maul in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), voiced by Sam Witwer. The pattern holds: the body is his, the voice belongs to someone else.

The case for him is ten minutes of Retaliation. Snake Eyes and Jinx (Élodie Yung) go after Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) in the Himalayas, and the fight takes place on ropes slung across a cliff, ninjas swinging wall to wall, cutting each other's lines, falling past the camera into cloud. Nobody speaks. Windon hangs the camera over the drop and swings with them, Barton and May hold each swing to its end, and the wind does the work the score usually does. We sat forward in a film we had otherwise given up on, and the reason is plain: Jon M. Chu filmed a fight as choreography, and Park, with no face and no lines, carried it. He has said, "I'm someone who tells the story with my body." For once a film let him.

The case against him is that we cannot tell you whether he can act in the ordinary sense, because almost nobody has asked. Toad was the chance and the film was too crowded. Since then the bigger parts have come in lower-profile genre films, Accident Man (2018) among them, where the camera is seldom steady enough to show what he is doing. He has been in front of us since 1999 and we have barely seen him. We would like a director to try him with his face uncovered and a fight shot from one position. Until then he remains a performer you know by his silhouette.