‘Despite being an action star, he is very insecure and shy’: Jean-Claude Van Damme’s downfalls and comebacks

Ciudad Real Airport was one of the great fiascos of Spain’s property bubble era, a ghost airport that cost up to €1 billion ($1.16 billion) and was eventually auctioned off for a fraction of that amount.

Yet some might consider it money well spent when they learn that it served as the setting for The Epic Split (2013), Volvo’s astonishing advertisement in which Jean-Claude Van Damme performed his most famous pose, the spagat (a 180-degree leg split), standing between two moving trucks to demonstrate the vehicles’ stability. With 127 million views on YouTube alone, the commercial rivals some of the action star’s most famous films in popularity, including Kickboxer (1989), Street Fighter (1994) and Universal Soldier (1992).

The spagat is also the concept that cultural journalist and filmmaker Lorenzo Ayuso, 39, uses as the starting point for his in-depth study of the Belgian actor’s career in Van Damme. El héroe de Vitruvio (Van Damme: The Vitruvian Hero), a nearly 700-page book. The cover, illustrated by Azahara Gómez, is, naturally, a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the ideal proportions of the human body, except that Van Damme is doing the splits, something the Renaissance genius had not factored into his calculations.

“Van Damme has always been searching for balance, something that’s hard to maintain in an exercise like the spagat. That’s why it worked as an image to talk about his two extremes,” the author explains.

That duality — contradictions and tensions — has marked the star’s career and shapes Ayuso’s journey through his filmography. The writer identifies four periods: Kumite (1986-91), films centred on martial arts tournaments; Deluxe (1991-99), his leap into big-budget Hollywood productions; Via Crucis (2001-08), when he descended into the direct-to-video market; and In Pro Per (2008-18), his reinvention through semi-autobiographical projects.

Ayuso admits that his own evolution as a Van Damme fan ran in parallel to the actor’s career. “I saw Kickboxer when I was four and two images stuck with me: Tong Po [the villain] kicking a beam and, above all, Van Damme stuffing his fists with resin and glass for the final fight,” he says.

“All that martial arts mythology had a huge impact on me,” he continues. “The usual thing happened: I took up karate and rented all his films. Then I hit adolescence, studied audiovisual communication and went through a period of distance. It seems that when you want to take cinema seriously, certain genres, actors or films no longer fit with what a true cinephile is supposed to admire.”

In 2008, something changed, both for Ayuso and for the press, which had traditionally loathed Van Damme’s films. With JCVD, the actor ventured into autofiction in a drama in which he played himself. Confessional in tone, the film stripped away his status as a martial arts star and revealed a flawed, erratic human being beneath. At least in the eyes of many critics and viewers, the scandals surrounding his cocaine addiction, multiple marriages and bouts of unprofessional behaviour were atoned for, and he received the best reviews of his career.

“When I saw it, I felt the need to reconnect with him,” the writer says. “I went back to his films and discovered someone who had done more interesting things than he’s credited for, who doesn’t fit the stereotype of an action hero.”

For Ayuso, Van Damme deserves to be considered an actor-auteur, someone who leaves a distinctive stamp on his films even when he is not directing or writing them. That is not to say he never worked behind the camera: he made his directorial debut with The Quest in 1996. While less invested viewers may see the exploits of various muscle-bound action stars as largely interchangeable, Ayuso argues that only Van Damme could have made films such as Bloodsport (1988) or Lionheart (1990).

“They are very distinctive and idiosyncratic,” says Ayuso. “That comes from his unusual mix of influences, combining martial arts with his European background. He’s always said that his idols are Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, actors with a screen presence very different from that of the classic American hero. Another fascinating thing about Van Damme is that he has become, almost accidentally, a very good storyteller of his own life. He’s also a tough guy, but very graceful. His screen persona is difficult to replicate.”

Recurring themes also run through Van Damme’s films. The most obvious is the doppelgänger: stories in which he has a twin, a double or a clone, someone he may either join forces with or confront. In a 2024 EL PAÍS article, psychologist David C. Hayes, an admirer of the Belgian martial artist, linked this motif to the bipolar disorder Van Damme has spoken about publicly, describing it as a device that “highlights the struggle with oneself”.

“From the start, Van Damme has had many conflicts about what he wanted to be,” says Ayuso. “In his youth he trained in karate and ballet, two very different disciplines, although the latter gave him flexibility he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Double Impact, the film where he establishes the twin device, allows him to preserve aspirations of stardom while showing he can express himself in different ways, that he’s not limited to one register or merely a physique.”

“I don’t know if I want to fuck you or fight you”

During the promotion of the frenetic Hard Target (1998), Van Damme recounted to a journalist an epiphany he experienced in Hong Kong as a result of cocaine use. In his hotel room, he wrote 80 pages straight while analyzing his emotions.

“I wrote and wrote, and I nearly passed out. I was dying. I saw my body lying there. I felt cold, I felt hot. I felt fear. I didn’t feel like a man or a woman,” he said.

Beyond illustrating the destructive spiral he was caught in during the 1990s, the episode highlights another distinctive aspect of the actor: the gender fluidity of his screen persona. Once again, Ayuso turns to the spagat to explain the idea. “As an exercise, the spagat has often been seen as feminine,” says the writer. “This breaks with the idea of the action hero in constant movement. The spagat is based on the passive display of physical capacities.”

Another example of this kind of pure display can be found in one of the most memorable scenes in Van Damme’s filmography, in Kickboxer, when he provokes a group of bar toughs with a wildly uninhibited dance routine.

But according to Ayuso, “the film where it’s most evident is Lionheart. In an illegal fight, one of his opponents tells him: ‘I don’t know if I want to fuck you or fight you.’ The real antagonist is the woman who puts him in that circuit, trying to turn him into her slave and increasingly sexualize him. There is an obvious desire to put himself on display, to show off his body. He likes to be looked at, to be both subject of action and object of desire.”

The Madrid-based author also devotes attention in his incisive book to one of the defining trademarks of the Belgian star’s films: the “butt shot.”

“The female gaze is very much present in his films,” Ayuso argues. “There is a commercial element to it. He knows he has an exceptional physique, and that by taking his clothes off he can reach an audience that probably would not otherwise watch his movies. The action scenes are sometimes framed as a female fantasy, and they can verge on parody, as in Inferno, when he is in the middle of a threesome with two women, yet what really matters is his physique.”

To top it all off, the scene ends with an elderly female voyeur peering through the window. “It is also about pushing the body to its limits and blurring gender boundaries. Bodybuilding is ultimately based on enlarging and exaggerating the same muscles, so male and female bodies tend to resemble each other,” says Ayuso.

Van Damme has been married for decades to bodybuilder Gladys Portugues, and their daughter Bianca is a martial artist.

Trained in Belgium by martial arts master Claude Goetz, Jean-Claude Van Damme arrived in the United States with a French-speaking accent he never lost, questionable acting skills and a determination to make it in movies. From his first significant role in the 1986 martial arts classic No Retreat, No Surrender, in which he played the nemesis of a young fighter trained by the ghost of Bruce Lee, he advanced the only way he knew how. Cannon Films founder Menahem Golan, the first major producer to back him, was never particularly impressed, but Van Damme’s athletic and acrobatic abilities were impossible to ignore. His reputation for being difficult, often delivering real blows during choreography, did little to endear him to colleagues.

The success of Universal Soldier and Timecop (1994) turned him into a major star and briefly shook the dominance of action cinema’s reigning kings, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. He also helped reshape Hollywood action films by bringing over some of the brightest talents from Hong Kong cinema, including directors John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark. But poor management and poor handling of fame, coupled with his self-destructive tendencies, eventually brought him down.

“At this point, any Van Damme fan knows that he has a tendency to sabotage himself,” Ayuso admits. “No matter how much of a muscular action star he is, apparently very tough and rugged, he is actually quite insecure and shy. At times, he has been attached to promising projects that failed to live up to their potential because he refused to compromise with directors, demanded changes or interfered in the editing process out of a need for control. At other times, he seems afraid that he’s the butt of a joke, or afraid of taking the leap and crashing.”

In Van Damme: The Vitruvian Hero, Ayuso recalls how JCVD nearly didn’t happen when, shortly after production began, its star considered walking away from the project. The crisis was defused only after an emergency visit from Mabrouk El Mechri, the film’s director and a devoted Van Damme fan, who reassured him that the film was not intended to humiliate him.

In recent years, besides showing a greater willingness to poke fun at himself, as in Jean-Claude Van Johnson (2016), the series in which he plays a secret agent posing as an actor, the Belgian star has taken his screen characters in a darker direction. In the belated sequels Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012), for example, the former hero becomes almost indistinguishable from a killer or a psychopath, a shift that can also be read as a rebellion against being confined to a single archetype.

Among his future projects, Van Damme has spent the past 16 years teasing a second directorial effort, Frenchy (formerly known as Full Love, Soldiers and The Eagle Path). The 2010 film has yet to be released as a result of repeated re-edits and the shooting of additional scenes.

His most notable return to the headlines came after allegations surfaced in April last year linking him to a purported human-trafficking network in Romania in 2015. No formal charges have been brought against the actor, who has denied any involvement, and no significant developments have emerged since.

“Personally, the accusations left me quite disturbed,” Lorenzo Ayuso laments. “From what I could dig up, it seems the case has stalled. Again, without knowing more, it’s one of the reasons I try in the book to establish how Van Damme has created a cinematic personality that is larger than the person. A projection of what a hero is isn’t necessarily reality.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition