‘Street Fighter’ Movie Director Says Jean-Claude Van Damme Was ‘Coked Out Of His Mind’ During Filming


Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Jean-Claude Van Damme aka ‘the Muscles from Brussels’ was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. This was an era when plot and production didn’t matter so much as the premise. Think back to films like Cyborg (1989), Kickboxer (1989), and Lionheart (1990). There wasn’t a lot to the plot other than Jean-Claude Van Damme had to go somewhere, do something, and fight people along the way.

So when Street Fighter (1994) hit theaters it never really mattered that the acting or plot of the movie sucked, all that mattered was there were a handful of good hand-to-hand combat scenes and one-liners. The movie based on the video game was directed by Steven de Souza who recently gave a tell-all interview to The Guardian about overcoming a military coup while filming, Chun-Li actress Ming-Na Wen punching one of the actors so hard he cried, and how allegedly out of control Jean-Claude Van Damme was on set.

He’s waited all of these years to open up about JCVD’s on-set antics, and claims it was so bad they needed a handler to look after Jean-Claude around the clock:

Jean-Claude Van Damme stood out as the archetypal movie star, with an ego to match. As he later admitted, he also came into Street Fighter with a major cocaine habit. At one stage in the 1990s, he was hoovering 10g a day; and $10,000 a week.
“I couldn’t talk about it at the time, but I can now: Jean-Claude was coked out of his mind,” says de Souza. “The studio had hired a wrangler to take care of him, but unfortunately the wrangler himself was a bad influence. Jean-Claude was calling in sick so much I had to keep looking through the script to find something else to film; I couldn’t just sit around for hours waiting for him. On two occasions, the producers allowed him to go to Hong Kong, and both occasions he came back late – on Mondays he just wasn’t there at all.”
Heygate has similar memories. “He was an interesting man, but he was extremely hard to work with – there are a lot of stories I can’t share,” he says. “There was one time he was in the trailer and he was quite pissed. My assistant couldn’t get him out, I couldn’t get him out, so I had to call the producer, Chad Rosen, to get him out. Then he came out with a bottle of a champagne. I told him it was against health and safety to have alcohol on set. From that point on, he hated me.” (via Guardian)

Other anecdotes of JCVD on the Street Fighter set include him having the Presidential Suite at the hotel where they had to install a gym for him because he claimed: “I have to pump up my muscles!”

Honestly, this entire piece on the filming of Street Fighter is amazing. It talks about the military coup, on-set affairs, renting out entire clubs for everyone to party. It sounds like a complete shit show and not too far off from how the comedy Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. was portrayed. I highly recommend reading the full piece on the Guardian.