Nearly three years after Iron Fist was the first of five Marvel shows cancelled by Netflix, the widely panned series is in the news again. In a recent interview celebrating an Emmy nomination, Iron Fist stunt coordinator Brett Chan alluded to the Immortal Iron Fist himself not wanting to take part in training prior to the show’s fight scenes.
Chan was speaking on JAMCast, a weekly podcast hosted by fellow stunt coordinator Travis Wong. It’s here Chan instantly shook his head when Wong mentioned Iron Fist, seemingly joking about having PTSD after having worked on the show. He also seemed to suggest that Finn Jones didn’t want to train prior to his fight scenes.
“You would be surprised. I got slammed by a lot of people after that came out, they had no idea,” Chan said on the podcast. “Johnny and myself were doing 21-22 hour days trying to make things working and having Marvel say ‘Eh, no.'”
He added, “Everyone’s fighting and the actor doesn’t want to train and…’Guys, throw me a bone. Give me something to work with here.’ That’s probably why the best sequences were with Jessica Henwick because she trained four hours a day and she had zero martial arts experience.”
Iron Fist ended up the lowest-rated series out of anything Marvel Television produced. According to Jones in 2017, he only had 15 minutes to train before filming fight sequences because “the schedule was so tight.”
“But really, I was learning the fight scenes 15 minutes before we actually shot them because the schedule was so tight,” Jones told Metro at the time. “So 15 minutes before, the stunt director would talk me through the choreography and I’d just jump straight into it. It really was a baptism of fire and I just learned on the job and I’ve been doing it for 12 months now. With practice, you just get better and better with dealing with that kind of schedule.”
“It was very intense, to begin with,” he added. “When I first moved over to New York, before I started actually filming, I had three weeks of very intense martial arts and weight training preparation. But then unfortunately once the show started, the filming schedule was just so tight – I was working 14 hours every day, six days a week, days into nights, nights into days – and actually my schedule didn’t allow me to continue the training as much as I really hoped.”
Both seasons of Iron Fist are now streaming on Netflix.
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