Xie Miao & Joe Taslim

Actors Joe Taslim and Xie Miao have spent their illustrious martial arts careers believing in the power of their grips.

In judo, Taslim explained, the sleeve and collar are levers of control. Once a judoka gets both, “you win about eighty percent of the time.” So when Xie’s character, Wang Wei, peels off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves in the midst of their first fight in The Furious, the moment plays like a sudden trapdoor opening beneath Taslim’s martial identity.

This fight scene between the two characters lasts only moments, but it captures the precise choreography and close attention to detail in the film. The film follows Navin and Wei as they tear through a criminal network to save their kidnapped loved ones. Across its bruising fights, bodies speak where words are absent, drawing directly from the main characters’ origins. Taslim’s Navin is a judoka searching for control as he anxiously hopes to rescue his wife from a gang of thugs. Wei attacks with the discipline of a father just as desperate to save his kidnapped daughter from the same group. As a result, the two characters’ chilling backstories turn their initial clash and subsequent fights as partners into battles shaped as much by grief as by martial style.

Wei is a mute tradesman who never speaks a single line in the film; his silence was an intentional choice by Xie and the film's director, Kenji Tanigaki. Whereas most action announces every blow with a grunt or a shout, Xie carefully stripped Wei of noise. "I chose to stay silent during the fights," he said. "I wanted all the strength turning inward, not outward." The result is eerie, especially beside Wei’s enemies, who breathe aggressively and shout profanities. "Every punch becomes an expression of inner power. When you can't express anger outwardly, it can be more powerful than an ordinary move,” Xie said.

Taslim's fight sings a louder note. In judo, reaching for the sleeve means reaching for leverage, which is exactly why Wei’s jacket undoes him so completely. The duel sets up Wei and Navin’s partnership, where the test is not simply who can overpower whom. It brings together Taslim’s judo, built around leverage and control, and Xie’s wushu, rooted in stance and speed. The drama comes early, with each man trying to make the other fight in his own language.

Tanigaki and action director Sonomura Kensuke shaped both fighting styles as conversations. For Xie, that design became an invitation to bring his own martial arts adaptation into the film. He had peppered Tanigaki with questions during training: “Does this look good? Does this look bad? Is this perfect or not?” Xie said. "He said, ‘that's not what matters. What matters is that you're doing it—that's your style.'" From there, Xie let his roots surface: “My character holds his stance very low, which is characteristic of Chinese martial artists. What I love about the action design in this film is that it empowers everyone's movement, both mental and physical. To me, that is what matters most.”

That demand for intentional movement is what makes The Furious so compelling and natural. “The more you do it, the more you realize action isn't about looking cool," Taslim said. “A lot of people think doing action means hurting the guy for real and to look badass. That's the shallow level. That's fake action.”

In fact, Xie saw that same intelligence built into their fights. "Navin is thinking about how to grab his opponent, while Wei is thinking about how to break that grip," he said. "There's a real mental dimension to it. It's very high-level design."

If the fights were built on martial discipline, the emotion driving them came from home. Taslim is a father of three, and the hardest scene he shot wasn't the most physical one, but the snake pit rescue surrounded by children.

“Every time I was on set, I kept thinking, 'What if this happened to my child?’ As a father, I know for sure that whatever you see in the movie, I would do in real life to protect my loved ones. My mind and body would go into monster mode,” Taslim said.

Xie didn't have to reach far either. "Summoning that emotion wasn't hard, because I have a daughter," he said. Whenever a scene involved Wei's missing daughter, he simply imagined his own. "I would picture my own daughter in her place, and the feeling became completely authentic."

Nowhere was that more punishing than the ice-factory sequence where Wei finally faces the man who took her. "It was the first time I'd ever played someone facing the person who kidnapped my daughter," he said. "When I read that part of the script, the feeling was the most intense of all. Once I let myself feel it, I didn't hold back at all."

That willingness to give everything extends beyond The Furious’ plot and into the actors’ drive for on-screen perfection, which is why both actors pointed to the chaotic five-way brawl as the real test. For Xie, the obstacle was sheer coordination. "The most challenging part was the timing," he said. "With all five of us fighting at once, I sometimes couldn't even find my opponent, but I didn't want any regrets about this film. After the shoot, I felt I'd grown a great deal."

Taslim described the same scene as a lesson in ego, or the absence of one. "It's not about me, it's not about you, it's about the scene," he said. “There's one goal. We trusted our director and our co-actors; they're our brothers, our family. If everyone agrees to that, you can deliver something out of this world.”

That same refusal to hold anything back is what both actors hope younger audiences recognize beyond the choreography. Xie, who has spent a career inside martial-arts films, returns to creativity and the belief that there is always another way to move. “We each have one body, two arms, two legs, and yet there's still room for new choreography," he said. "Creation is always possible, even when it's difficult. Creativity is the most important thing in the world.”

Taslim widens it into a kind of creed—natural for the actor who plays a justice-seeker. "Without passion, it's impossible," he said. “There's so much injustice in this world, right in front of our eyes, and we have two choices. We can walk away and pretend not to see it, or we can do something. If everybody just pretends not to see, what kind of world are we leaving our children?”

Those ideas make sense coming from martial artists like Taslim and Xie. For this duo, action has never been only about the body but the strength it channels in its most subtle moves. In a film where one fighter grasps for a necessary sleeve and the other removes it entirely, The Furious finds its force not in the violence itself, but in what happens when two artists fight for something beyond themselves.