John Wick 4's Scott Adkins Embodied Mike Tyson While Doing Stunts In Prosthetics
Martial arts and stunt legend Scott Adkins got a chance to really go for it with his role in "John Wick: Chapter 4." After bugging franchise director Chad Stahelski for years to cast him in an actual role, the English stunt performer finally got his moment in the spotlight, playing the German head of the High Table, who's basically the bad boss at the end of the video game, Killa Harkan.
The hulking crime boss was a truly unique role for the prolific martial arts actor, who was previously known for his performance in "Undisputed II" and for playing karate expert and cartoonishly racist Marine gunnery sergeant Barton Geddes in "Ip Man 4: The Finale." That role saw him act opposite Hong Kong martial arts legend Donnie Yen, who would once again find himself faced with one of Adkins' grotesque villains in "John Wick: Chapter 4." But Killa Harkan was a long way from the ripped US Marine Yen's IP Man faced off against.
To play the ruthless yet charismatic Killa, the always-trim Adkins donned a 100-pound fat suit — a first for the English stuntman. The result was the creation of a large but deadly crime boss who faces off against Keanu Reeves' Wick in a Berlin nightclub, making for one of the most brutal, and challenging to shoot, fight scenes in "Chapter 4." But it wasn't just the massive set, hundreds of extras, and the constant presence of flowing water that made this particular showdown unique. Adkins invented a whole new combat style for Killa that was designed to tell its own story about the character's past and pay tribute to none other than Iron Mike Tyson.
Tyson was the blueprint
When you think of raw combat power, Mike Tyson immediately comes to mind. The former Heavyweight Champion of the World remains known as a vicious fighter who transcended boxing to become somewhat of a cultural reference point for unbridled aggression. So infamous were his punishing boxing skills that Tyson even turned up in Donnie Yen's IP Man franchise, going toe-to-toe with Yen's Wing Chun master in "Ip Man 3."
And in "John Wick: Chapter 4," not only does Keanu Reeves' hitman take on Yen's formidable combat skills, he comes about as close to facing Tyson as you can get without stepping in the ring with Iron Mike. That's because Scott Adkins based Killa Harkan's fighting style on the boxer.
Speaking to ScreenRant, Adkins talked about how the extensive prosthetics dictated his approach to the action, explaining how he wanted to, "keep it grounded with [Killa's] fighting style," while also wanting to, "sell the weight." He added:
"It's not just me in a fat suit. We wanted to sell that this guy is heavy and it is hard for him to move around. Yet in his past life, he used to be this deadly assassin himself and he knows how to throw down. So we came up with a kind of Mike Tyson style to the way he fights, but he can still bring it out when it counts. We didn't want to do a load of triple kicks and everything."
Besides the fact that it's cool to see a Tyson-esque fighting style in the John Wick franchise, it's doubly cool to know that it was developed as a way to convey Killa's past as a once "deadly assassin."
A new approach
Scott Adkins elaborated on Mike Tyson's influence on Killa's fighting style in a GQ interview, where he explained how, "bobbing and weaving, and throwing hard punches, heavy kicks" were the main techniques he focused on. Interestingly enough, he also revealed that most, if not all of Killa and John Wick's fight was created on the day of filming, saying, "I didn't rehearse anything with Keanu, but he's at a level now where he's so well trained that we could just come up with all of this on the spot, and he's able to just do it." With Adkins and Chad Stahelski putting so much thought into how Killa would fight and considering Reeves and Adkins are such seasoned pros, it's not surprising the whole fight was created on the fly.
What makes the Killa scenes even more effective is that Stahelski seemingly went into "John Wick: Chapter 4" wanting to put a new spin on what audiences had come to expect from the stars of the film. For the fight between Donnie Yen and Keanu Reeves, the director told Collider, "I can do the Donnie Yen triple kick. I can do all this, but you also want to do something different [...] let's do something we haven't seen before.'" And that seems to be the same approach he took to Adkins' character, writing him as a hulking bruiser that required Adkins to act in a fat suit for the first time and adapt his fighting style accordingly. And while "Chapter 4" almost has too much action even for an action movie, to his credit, Stahelski clearly intended to do something different with the relentless action sequences he shot.