In films, people sometimes forget and concentrate on the fight itself, which is great, but the 15 minutes that come beforehand are equally as breathtaking.

When I started martial arts... Bruce Lee is obviously the top dog and Jackie Chan is a legend. But for a lot of westerners it was Van Damme. He was the first person you saw that made you realise you didn't need to be Asian or Oriental to do that stuff.

Even when you spar for real and fight with full contact in training, you get hurt or you hurt someone and you see them trying to fight back. I want to inject as much reality as possible into fight scenes, even if some of the moves are slightly larger than life, if the emotion is there you'll then still be able to buy it. I recall seeing some films where people perform an acrobatic flip mid-fight and land with graceful precision and it's almost like watching Zorro... it's almost whimsical but you're no longer engaged.

I don't attract violence because of my stature and because of my lifestyle choices. I don't like to go out and be out of control or intoxicated because you could be the toughest guy in the world and still be vulnerable if you're not in control of yourself. And I don't like to go to place that are unnecessarily confrontational or dangerous. But I used to work in a pub and had to help the doorman fight off a load of people at one time. So, I've seen enough.

As an actor, it's all about whether you can sell the emotion on your face... that desperation, the panic and rage that comes with combat. The emotion of combat is important to me. I mean, you feel almost sick if you see a real fight where someone is getting badly beaten up. You can get emotionally involved in combat that has nothing to do with you in real-life, let alone if you are actually in it... or it's someone you know, and so you should have those same feelings on film.

A lot of fans are complaining nowadays of too much shaky cam in action scenes and not being able to see what is going on, but I don't want to disappoint people. I'm a huge admirer of action and I'm very passionate about it. I do believe that a lot of action could be done so much better in general, so I'm a real advocator for pushing things forward in that sense and giving the fans what they want.

Whenever you get game adaptations, it strikes me that it's always the gamers who get mugged because they try and make it for everyone else first and the actual gamers last.