“A love bomb was basically dropped in the heart of TBS,” says Billy Zane, “and, for the wrestling viewers, the like of which they’ve never seen, in a very watchable show. No one’s going to be changing the channel.”
Seen at the beginning of the month in the USA movie “Louis L’Amour’s The Diamond of Jeru,” and currently as the love interest of new cast regular Jeri Ryan on Fox’s “Boston Public,” Zane returns on Sunday in the TBS Superstation movie and series pilot “Invincible.”
From the production companies of martial-arts star Jet Li (“The One”) and actor-producer-director Mel Gibson, “Invincible” is directed by Jefery Levy (“Drive,” “Inside Monkey Zetterland,” “Dark Angel,” “Roswell”) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Michael Brandt and Derek Haas.
Zane plays Os, a mystical leader who pulls together four modern-day warriors to battle the evil Shadowmen, “dark angels” who have found a way to escape their imprisonment on Earth by destroying the world.
Os is a former Shadowman who has seen the light and gathered warriors representing the four elements – Air (Stacy Oversier, “The Guardian”), Fire (Tory Kittles, “Tigerland”), Water (Byron Mann, “The Corrupter”) and Metal (Dominic Purcell, “Mission: Impossible 2”) – to prevent the Shadowmen from getting their hands on the remaining half of an ancient and dangerous artifact.
Tony Ching (“The Heroic Trio,” “A Chinese Ghost Story,” “The Duel”) is the action unit director for “Invincible,” overseeing and choreographing the martial-arts sequences. He also put the cast through a rigorous, and sometimes painful, training camp.
“I’ve never done any martial arts,” says Kittles. “We had a training session with Tony Ching. It’s kind of humbling, because he and his team have been doing this for 20 years. You come in as an actor, thinking you can do just about anything, but then you see them and see what they can do, and you realize, without training, your body just doesn’t move that way. But when one of those guys comes up to you and says you did a good job, that is the ultimate gratification.
“The training for the movie was basically two weeks of hell. It was seven hours a day of martial arts, then a hour or so each day of weight training and cardio. They stretch us out, putting us in all kinds of positions. I was feeling things I had never felt before. By the end, it felt like two years.”
Mann, who grew up in Hong Kong, had spent his life watching martial-arts movies and had training from previous roles, but he still found Ching’s direction challenging. “Tony’s looking for beauty in the movement, because he’s used to beauty and movement from such martial artists as Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee.
“So if he thinks our kicks are not powerful enough, he says, ‘More power.’ And we instantly understand what he means. We need to move harder or snap faster.”
While “Invincible” boasts state-of-art action and dazzling wire work, Zane insists that’s not what it’s really about. “We used the most current and attractive genre,” he says, ” to ply some beautiful, spiritual, speculative dialogues and simple truths. I’ve come to discover, of late, that that’s become the forte – very soft subversion, without letting anyone know it.
“Slide it in there under one premise, using the aesthetic of wire work and great martial arts, photographed beautifully, but talk about fighting with love and compassion, not fighting anger with anger, pulling on ancient Japanese texts on strategy with modern spiritual self-help information.”
