VOD Spotlight: “The Green Hornet” offers another memorable Kato

Jeff Pfeiffer

15 years ago

“As an irresponsible idiot, I’m quite good,” says Seth Rogen, who stars as Britt Reid, the hard-partying playboy who turns to vigilante crime fighting in The Green Hornet. But as any fan of the Hornet knows, the actor playing Kato is a costar in every sense of the word. It’s actually hard to remember that Van Williams played Reid in the original TV series, but everyone with any interest in the history of superheroes remembers that Bruce Lee was Kato. So it’s particularly fitting that Asian pop superstar Jay Chou should play Kato in the new Green Hornet, as Chou says that his aim in life was to become Bruce Lee.

“It was immediately clear that he was super cool,” Rogen says of Chou. “He’s really charismatic, he’s handsome, he has that cool hair. He’d never take orders from a guy like Britt Reid. That made him perfect for the part.”

With supreme confidence, Chou made the part of Kato uniquely his own. Though he had no martial arts training beyond a familiarity with nunchaku born out of his admiration for Lee, his background in choreography made him a quick learner, and he picked up the fight sequences quickly.

“He completely pulled off everything that we thought he could do, but more so, because he was even cooler than we thought he could be,” says Rogen. “We’re not cool, so we weren’t prepared for how cool he could be.”

“The Green Hornet” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.

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