There’s seemingly a new action movie opening every weekend. What you don’t see every week are Black stars kicking butt and Black women performing martial arts.
Now there’s Trouble Man — an action comedy starring martial artist Michael Jai White as ex-cop Jaxen, who works security in a club and moonlights as a private investigator.
White produced and directed the film and stars alongside his wife of ten years, actress and martial arts expert, Gillian White.
The cast also includes Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Levy Tran, and Mike Epps.
Urban Hollywood 411 recently interviewed Michael and Gillian for behind the scenes details on their independent film.
“I got the original script, like almost 20 years ago,” Michael said. “It went through different rewrites and got to a point where I put a lot of my spin on it, and we got it done.”
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We all know Hollywood likes to make the same types of movies over and over, again. When something works, the industry sticks with what it knows makes money.
According to Michael, studios weren’t exactly clamoring for a martial arts comedy with a mostly-Black cast.
“There hasn’t been anything like that, right? But it’s in the tradition of the movies that I loved growing up,” he said.
His favorite movies back then were buddy comedies starring Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones, and Harry Belafonte.
“You had A Piece of The Action, the Cosby and Poitier movie. You had Uptown Saturday Night, where you left the movie feeling great,” he said.
For this movie, Method Man plays his sidekick.
To assemble the cast, the actor-director called up his friends. While he wasn’t able to pay them blockbuster-type salaries to work on the low budget film, the actors believed in the project.
“They’re really about friendship, bonds and the culture, just like Method Man in this movie,” Michael said. “He’s really a hero because sometimes it takes you telling your own management and representatives, ‘We’ll make money on the next one. This one is from the heart.’ He stepped up to get this done with me.”
Orlando Jones plays a music executive who hires Jaxen to find missing R&B singer Jahari (La La Anthony). Jaxen knows the label exec is shady, but he never imagined the hitmaker would have ties to the mob and Asian gangs.
As Jaxen gets closer to uncovering the truth, the gangs get more aggressive, and the action scenes more intense.
Fight choreographer Joey Min and his team incorporated “nine different styles” of martial arts into the film. Gillian’s character practices Wing Chun, a Chinese style of hand-to-hand combat.
“You haven’t really seen a Black couple on screen doing this, ever,” she said.
“That’s the style that Bruce Lee did,” Michael explained. “Ip Man was Bruce Lee’s teacher, and so that style that you’re seeing is representative of Wing Chun, which was interestingly, developed by a woman.”
He also addressed claims that Black stars are not marketable abroad.
“Action is the one thing that sells globally,” he said. “I was in Romania and I couldn’t get three blocks without somebody asking me for a picture or an autograph. And I was like, ‘wow,’ because I found out my brand sells in places like that, and in China and all these different places, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m still here, and why I’m able to get these movies done because of their overseas marketability.”
As for Trouble Man, he revealed there’s a musical surprise in the involving Keith Sweat and Stevie Wonder.
“Keith Sweat and I are like family… He sang the final closing song in the movie, nobody, not one person. I must have talked to 200 people and played that song. Nobody ever realizes it’s Keith Sweat,” Michael said.
“I played it for an individual who was so impressed that he joined and added his touch on the movie — and his name is Stevie Wonder. So Keith Sweat is backed up by Stevie Wonder’s harmonica on that song,” he added.
Between the music, action, comedy and a sprinkle of romance, Gillian said the film has something for everyone.
“I really feel with Trouble Man, you’ll walk out of the theater after you’ve watched the film, feeling completely satisfied,” she said.
Trouble Man is distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films. The movie opens Friday, Aug. 1 in select theaters and on digital platforms.
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