Street Fighter Star Andrew Koji On Playing Video Games’ Most Iconic Martial Artist

ANDREW KOJI’S SPENT YEARS ESSAYING PHYSICALLY FORMIDABLE MEN onscreen. Over three seasons of the show Warrior, he played Ah Sahm, the migrant martial arts prodigy navigating the brutal Tong Wars of late 19th-century San Francisco. In the upcoming screen adaptation of Street Fighter, Koji has taken on the video game’s chief mascot and central character Ryu. The stoic, wandering martial artist, committed to a lifelong journey of self-mastery and spiritual growth, awakened him to quite a few home truths on the true definition of masculine prowess, Koji tells Esquire India.

One of the character’s major attributes is that despite his incredible strength, he isn’t interested in demonstrating any of it. In a world where everything exists for social media, Koji says, it was something that really drew him in. “I can connect with it for sure. Ryu is definitely not, ‘Oh, look at me’. I can connect with him in that my own journey with martial arts is just self-improvement and growth as a human being—I’m not really too interested in becoming a champion.”

Ryu, Koji, feels is “on the same path but times 10.” Referring to the canonical game ending of Street Fighter II, where the character walks away from the ceremony after winning the first World Warrior Championship, Koji says, “He doesn’t care about fame, glory, all those things. That, to me, represents an aspect to him that I love very much. That’s something we can all strive for. We don’t need fame and glory. Do it for ourselves—do it for yourself.”

That sense of shifting satisfaction might be why the actor responds affirmatively to whether his idea of what’s physically impressive has evolved through the years.

“Sometimes, as I train with 20- or 21-year-olds, who’re just starting out with MMA and all that, you start to realise that there’s a reason why many martial arts champions retire by the time they’re 40. Many of them even in their early 30s. Being a man and what’s formidable definitely changes throughout our lives, doesn’t it? We’re always thinking about how when you’re young, you’re attracted to strength and super loud confidence. And as I'm getting older, it’s definitely changing to something else. I’m still finding out what it is,” a reflective Koji explains. The 38-year-old, born to a Japanese father and an English mother, started out in films as a teenager, moving to Thailand and Japan for work.

When you think of a martial arts champion purely in terms of the body, an unbreakable mass of dense muscle fibres and an unrelenting network of sinews and veins appears. It’s all designed for agility. But in the game, the bodies of characters receive a larger-than-life representation of muscularity, much like in the massively popular animated TV manga Dragon Ball Z.

“The physique aspect is tricky, because if you see throughout games 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, they get more muscly, more muscly, even more muscly. It’s extreme bodybuilding. And for martial arts—if you see the UFC, it’s a very different body type,” Koji says.

Gaming mechanics allow even characters who are heavy heavyweights to move like their middle lightweights, he points out. “So, our goal was to get as, as Noah [Centineo; plays Ryu’s friend and rival Ken Masters] would put it, as ‘porked’ or as ‘jacked’ as possible… Whilst also being able to practically still move and do what was required for the characters,” he explains.

Often, in video games, the ‘game feel’ of combat makes up for the bone-crunch viscerality that exists in martial arts. In a medium like film, the physical and tactile experience of contact, impact, breath and the weight of a body is at risk of getting lost. From a digitally fantastical world like Street Fighter, how does one preserve sensation when so much of what the audience sees is being created or augmented digitally?

Koji tells me that the endeavour, for him and stunt director Jon Valera, was to find moments where Ryu could be depicted as grounded in karate, the form on which his fighting style is based. “Even though he does have his Hadouken (a special energy attack within the game’s universe). I studied Shotokan Karate and Goju-ryu,” he says, of the karate styles that place emphasis on deep stances and powerful linear movements, and closed-fist strikes and direct linear attacks, respectively.

“Before that, I trained in judo and jujutsu to bring that feeling to it. I wanted to level up as a martial artist before, so that I could feel closer to what Ryu feels like—to have more knowledge and be able to help with the choreography. The goal was to find moments where he was grounded, find the physical storytelling through the fights. It’s trickier than when you’re doing a non-fantastical film,” he adds.

In the list of tricky things one’s got to contend with while adapting a cultural phenomenon, fulfilling a multi-generational expectation count sits at the top. For instance, Ryu has been imitated and followed by millions of people across the world for decades. Serving as an original prototype, he’s spawned “shoto”-style versions of characters. He popularised the fireball attack pose in pop culture and even inspired direct homages. Infusing new life into a character like that as a human performer could quickly get polarising. Koji relied on the guideposts that the game, the comic books and animated movie provided, and then added something of his own.

“This film is a story within the world of Street Fighter II that is fresh and new. And it is very three-dimensional and human in many ways. Once you see the film, I think you’ll see that. My job was to do my best at paying homage to the character, using the source material as guideposts, and bring my humanity to it. There’s a lot of pressure with characters that live inside people’s minds and hearts. So, when they see it in the film or the TV show, it’s like, ‘Now, that’s not my guy’. We might get some of that, but I can be at peace with the fact that I gave him a part of my heart… A part of my soul.”

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