The Cast of Street Fighter Debate Who Has The Best Hadouken
The cast talk muscle growth and playing 'Street Fighter' on set.
The cast of Street Fighter, along with director Kitao Sakurai, sat down with Fandango correspondent Mark Ellis to talk their latest film. Adapted from the iconic Capcom franchise, Street Fighter follows Chun-Li (Callina Liang) as she recruits fighters Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) and Ryu (Andrew Koji) to join the World Warrior Tournament and defeat dictator and tournament organizer M. Bison (David Dastmalchian).
Adapting such a beloved game means you need an encyclopedic knowledge of the source material. Luckily, there was a console set up to play Street Fighter between takes, and everyone took a turn in-costume. Among the cast, Andrew Schulz, who plays Dan Hibiki, was the best, but Sakurai recalls an anecdote when Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama visited set and joined a round.
“I will say, he dogwalked me,” wrestler Cody Rhodes, starring as Air Force pilot Guile, admits. “And I thought, like, ‘It’s your game, so maybe give me a little something’…he just destroyed me.”
But for all the homages to the games, Street Fighter is equally a movie for people with no knowledge of the franchise whatsoever.
“Regardless if you’re a fan of the game, you play at the game, you heard of the game, you haven’t heard of the game, this movie is made for the fans, but it’s also so open to anyone that’s never heard of it before. It’s so accessible, it’s just bat-shoot absurd, wild, zany, high-octane film,” Centineo vouches.
“My son knows the game well, and he loves it,” Dastmalchian adds. “My daughter has never played the game, doesn’t know anything about Street Fighter. It’s now her favorite movie.”
For a high-octane action film, the training process was equally intense for what Rhodes describes was a “porked” cast. Koji and Centineo grew the most bicep muscle, but the biggest achievement for muscle gain would go to Liang, who grew 6.5cm of thigh muscle on each leg to prep for Chun-Li’s iconic look.
And what of who in the cast has the best Hadouken? Of course, it would be Koji, who gives audiences a glimpse of the “Hadou-” but cuts it off there. “They’ll see the rest of it by coming to watch it in IMAX, [or] 4DX,” he teases.
Street Fighter is in theaters now. Get your tickets here.
