Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan (born 1954 in Hong Kong) trained at a Peking Opera school before becoming the world’s most beloved action star, famed for performing his own death-defying stunts across Drunken Master, the Police Story series, and Hollywood’s Rush Hour films. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2016 for his decades of work — much of it done without a stunt double, and with the broken bones to prove it.

An AI face-swap in “A Legend”

In July 2024, Chan starred in A Legend, director Stanley Tong’s fantasy follow-up to The Myth (2005), in which AI face-swap technology made the then-70-year-old appear roughly 27 in the film’s historical sequences. Chan was hesitant at first, but agreed after Tong showed him a series of test clips demonstrating how the technology could alter an actor’s face and restore his youth. Tong told Chinese media he wanted to be bold and create an “AI Jackie Chan,” arguing the technology breaks the limits of traditional special effects.

The experiment drew fierce debate. Chinese critics and moviegoers panned the de-aged face as uncanny — one widely shared one-star Weibo review said the AI alteration robbed the character of expression and made Chan look like a robot — while others praised the film’s daring. As one of the first megastars to lend his own face to generative de-aging at feature length, Chan turned an abstract industry debate into a concrete, watchable test case.

Chan’s own view of AI is wry rather than evangelical. Promoting Karate Kid: Legends in June 2025, he told Page Six that if he were starting out today, AI effects and green screens would mean he would never do his own stunts — the very thing that made him “Jackie Chan.” At 71, he was still doing them anyway.