He’s worked with Jackie Chan, Jet Li. Martial artist Alfred Hsing’s rise in film

Behind every action film – be it a biopic on wing chun kung fu master Ip Man or a Hollywood sci-fi flick – there is someone who choreographs the fight sequences and coordinates the stunts. Los Angeles-based actor and martial artist Alfred Hsing has been one of these masterminds for more than a decade. The 42-year-old worked as a member of the official Jackie Chan stunt team on the 2015 historical epic Dragon Blade and served as Jet Li’s assistant in 2010. More recently, he performed stunts in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) and was the action choreographer for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a new film sequel to the fantasy-adventure Nickelodeon animated show that came out in July. Hsing conceptualised the latter film’s action design, including choosing the weapons and abilities for Katara, Zuko and the other characters. After the artists finalised the scene boards, he choreographed the fight sequences and captured the moves on camera to provide a reference video for the animators. “At its core, I feel that Avatar: The Last Airbender [the original animated show, which ran from 2005 to 2008] is like a wuxia [film],” Hsing says. “You know, you have these travelling heroes learning [martial arts] skills and also sharing moral lessons. So I always felt it connected to me and my upbringing.” Many concepts in the animated series also directly reference Eastern mythology. In the TV show, characters bend the natural elements water, earth, fire and air by performing the martial art associated with each: tai chi, hung gar, northern Shaolin kung fu and baguazhang (a practice that emphasises circular footwork and fluid hand movements), respectively. But Hsing takes artistic liberty, adding his own creative twists to these movements and sprinkling in his own technical flair. How Hsing got into the movie industry “I didn’t know what my plan was out of college,” says Hsing, who now has hundreds of film credits under his belt – as an actor, stuntman, action coordinator and choreographer. Before that, he was grinding away in the corporate world. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsing was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he began training in Shaolin kung fu and wushu in his teens, quickly earning medals in national competitions. He recalls growing up watching martial arts films, including those of Jackie Chan and The Karate Kid. “When I was growing up, there was a stereotype that all Asians know kung fu … but the funny thing is that if you got to me, it’d be like, ‘Yeah I do know it,’” Hsing says. He studied economics and computer specialisation with a minor in East Asian languages at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2001-06. When not studying labour market and financial trends, he attended drama classes at the university. While a student, he even interviewed Stephen Chow Sing-chi when the Hong Kong star visited the campus. After Hsing graduated, he landed jobs at financial institutions KPMG and City National Bank, but soon quit the industry and committed himself to martial arts. He remembers weighing his options at the time and thinking: “If I take the risk into the unknown, then I can risk greatness.” In 2009, he made the United States Wushu A team. “That meant I could compete at the World Wushu Championships, which is an IOC [International Olympic Committee] recognised event,” he says. That same year, he became the first American male to bring home a gold medal at the championships. A ‘crazy crash course in filmmaking’ Hsing was promptly thrown into the world of martial arts cinema. He worked as an assistant to Jet Li from 2010 to 2011, following him from Hong Kong to Beijing to Singapore, and acted opposite him in the 2011 fantasy action film The Sorcerer and the White Snake. It was also during this period that Hsing studied acting at the Beijing Film Academy. Not long after, he was on Jackie Chan’s stunt team for the 2015 martial arts film Dragon Blade. Hsing also appeared as a stunt double alongside Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), trained Jennifer Tse Ting-ting for her stunts in Europe Raiders (2018) and acted in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). Despite working with so many A-list stars, Hsing says Chan and Li are the only two actors he recalls feeling truly star-struck by. “Those two people had such a deep impact on my youth when watching these films, and they were the few people of heroic representation [of Asians] in the West,” Hsing says. “Growing up as a second-generation Asian-American at that time – and even now – there aren’t many true big stars or just, like, people that you can model yourself after.” Hsing describes Chan and Li as a “yin and yang”. They are both driven by their shared ferocious desire to achieve excellence, but he notes that Chan was the extroverted mentor while Li wielded a quiet, focused determination. Hsing also met Hong Kong icon Donnie Yen while working in the US as a stunt coordinator for Ip Man 3 (2015) on the fight scene between Yen’s character and Mike Tyson’s. On that project, he also briefly studied under Yuen Woo-ping, a Hong Kong martial arts choreographer and director who served as an action choreographer or adviser on multiple Ip Man films, Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Recalling these projects, Hsing feels like he “had this crazy crash course in filmmaking” in which he saw the differences between Western and Eastern action films. Eventually, in 2019, he moved back to the US. More recently, Hsing starred in the Academy Award-nominated film Train Dreams (2025) as Fu Sheng, a Chinese railroad labourer in the US Pacific northwest during the early 20th century. Recapturing the magic of martial arts cinema In recent years, martial arts cinema has not been able to match the widespread popularity it achieved during its heyday in the 1980s and 90s despite more calls for Asian representation in Hollywood. “We need a new wave. I’m not saying there’s none, but not too many have really stepped into that forefront. So, you know, I volunteer to help,” Hsing says, laughing. These films require people who can “truly act and have the gong di – the martial arts fundamentals” in which they can shoot footage that feels authentic with minimal stunt doubles and cuts. But Hsing understands that it may be hard to recreate some of that past magic, as martial arts films used to spend months perfecting just single fight sequences. “In that golden era, there was this meticulousness to get the shot perfect because there’s this [idea] that film lasts forever … obviously that was before CGI and AI,” he says. Looking to the future, Hsing hopes to write and direct his own projects and has already written a few action scripts. “I mean, I didn’t go through 20 years or more of learning martial arts [and] being on the greatest martial arts sets … to not synthesise that information and put it out in my own way,” he says. In the coming months, Hsing’s fight choreography will be seen in another Avatar universe sequel animation, the TV series Avatar: Seven Havens. Perhaps because Hsing wears many hats in the film industry, Bryan Konietzko – one of the creators of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series – jokes that Hsing is “the avatar” since he mastered bending each element. But for those who are curious, Hsing chuckles: “If I weren’t Avatar Alfred, I think I might be an airbender. I can be spontaneous – go with the flow.”

He’s worked with Jackie Chan, Jet Li. Martial artist Alfred Hsing’s rise in film

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}After leaving a financial career, the wushu champion became a fight coordinator, stuntman and actor working with some of film’s top stars

After leaving a financial career, the wushu champion became a fight coordinator, stuntman and actor working with some of film’s top stars