Muscles, cocaine and redemption: how Jean-Claude Van Damme managed to rise from the ashes at 60

Actor Jean-Claude Van Damme shows off one of his great talents (his muscular biceps) in October 1990 in West Hollywood, Los Angeles.Ron Galella, Ltd. / Ron Galella Collection via Getty

One of the most watched films of the moment on Netflix is ​​the

of the Jean-Claude Van Damme classic

.

Faced with this success, the platform has signed the Belgian actor for an upcoming project entitled

.

Van Damme's legacy has received a thousand sticks, but he resists biting the dust and survives thanks to television commercials, memes or movies and television series where the actor directly plays himself.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, who turns 60 this Sunday, has perfected the best role of his life: Jean-Claude Van Damme.

He wasn't always good at it.

Its boom-and-bust story is riddled with clichés.

As a child he was so weak that his father was ashamed of him and enrolled him in karate classes.

At the age of 18, he changed his bottle-ass glasses for contact lenses and opened a gym in Brussels with which he named his dreams: California Gym.

"It always rained in Brussels, the sky was gray and depressing," explained the actor in

.

“This is why I liked going to the movies, where the sky was always full of light and bright colors.

I used to say to my mother: 'I'm going to be a movie star.'

And she would say, 'Wonderful, Jean-Claude, but don't tell Daddy.'

At 22 he left everything (including his first wife) to move to Hollywood with 2,500 euros in his pocket.

He worked as a pizza delivery man, limousine driver, carpet cleaner, and aerobics instructor.

At night he slept in his car and during the day he devoted himself to leaving photos of himself with his résumé and the nickname he had called himself, "the muscles of Brussels", on the windshields of Hollywood executives.

Sometimes he would park for hours outside their mansions (or Sylvester Stallone's) to see if they could be found.

But he only got minor roles like that of

, where he was credited as "very gay karateka."

When he was hired as an extra in the dance movie

, he did such flying kicks to highlight that the director eliminated his shots from the final cut.

One day he passed Menahem Golam on the street, the president of the B-series production company Canon who had made Chuck Norris a star.

Van Damme approached him and showed him his flexibility: a high kick that passed the producer, who was 1'89, over the head.

Golam summoned him to his dispatch the next day.

“I was waiting seven hours.

I told him that my father was ashamed of me for having left a good life in Belgium to come to the United States.

I offered to work for free.

I said, 'You can make a lot of money with me, you can make me a star.

I'm young Chuck Norris, maybe the new Stallone.

Look at what muscles. '

I took off my shirt, grabbed two chairs and jumped, spreading my legs to support one on each backrest, ”Van Damme recalled.

Golam asked him if he had a work permit and he said yes.

It was a lie, but luckily

(today Donald Trump's favorite movie) was going to be shot in Hong Kong.

Van Damme used the 20,000 euros he charged for

to travel to Malaysia and Paris, without anyone asking, to promote it.

The film multiplied its budget of one million euros by 30.

One critic defined Van Damme's performance as "a lobotomized newt."

Reagan-era action movies fetishized Yankee muscle.

The engine was always family revenge, emulating the

that had refounded North American mythology at the beginning of the 20th century, and the bad guys were always the new enemies of the country: Russians (the Cold War), Arabs (the oil war) or Latinos (the war on drugs).

Those films, which in Spain were known as "American", were even more successful in Europe and Asia than in the United States, confirming that US imperialism had an overwhelming weapon in the cinema: a whole generation of children grew up idolizing the unbridled testosterone of supermen like Hulk Hogan or Van Damme.

He, like Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, played American tough guys despite having an almost unintelligible accent.

His filmography was nurtured by balanced versions of

,

or

as

,

or

.

In his films, Van Damme went through delusional adventures such as fighting a snake, being crucified by pirates or saving a baby from a tiger in the Colosseum (packed with explosives) with the help of Dennis Rodman.

And he knew how to turn his null expressiveness into a character trait: his characters were never fazed by danger.

Van Damme differed from Stallone, Schwarzenegger or Norris, apart from in his youth, in two key elements: his fighting style was graceful and aesthetic thanks to his five years training in ballet and he was sexier for the female audience.

He was not ashamed to exploit her eroticism and her body was the greatest special effect in his films.

In all of them he kept his ass in the air.

The action cinema of that time promoted a cult of the male body that bordered on pornography and, thanks to Van Damme's tendency to wear tiny and tight clothes (and take them off at the slightest opportunity), the Belgian even emerged as an erotic myth for the gay public.

In 1993 she appeared on the cover of

telling "her seduction secrets."

He earned three consecutive MTV Most Desirable Actor Award nominations for

,

and

.

And when he appeared playing himself in a

chapter

, where he bragged about being able to crush nuts with his butt, Rachel and Monica fought to get him.

Hollywood granted him the passport to the major leagues and the actor doubled his salary in each film:

,

and

, where he performed his classic jump opening his legs in his underwear, swept the box office.

The influential

magazine

capped him off with a cover story in which Van Damme's attorney explained that he was destined to attract female audiences to action movies and transition into Tom Cruise-worthy roles.

"The first impression he makes is not of a Hollywood star, but of a provincial coach of some European gym," described

.

And then the actor's personal life began to overshadow his rising professional career, fueling the prejudice that Van Damme was not a Hollywood star but a vulgar European redneck.

In 1994 he abandoned his third wife and mother of his two children, the bodybuilder and model Gladys Portugues, after meeting Darcy Lapier.

She won him over by behaving like any of the stunning blondes he saved in his movies: she met him in a Hong Kong hotel suite and, upon opening the door, whispered "Jean-Claude, make love to me."

But while Lapier was pregnant, the actor had an affair with Kylie Minogue on the set of

in Thailand.

That movie was the highest salary of his career (six million euros) and the status went to his head.

Van Damme played Colonel Guile, an emblem of American militarization ("You have lost your head!" An ambassador snapped; "No, it is you who have lost your balls," answered Guile) with which the film tried to conquer the American public who hardly knew the video game on which it was based.

But his salary consumed the budget to prevent the rest of the cast from practicing martial arts, so

was a fight movie in which no one knew how to fight.

Filming was constantly delayed: Van Damme refused to leave his dressing room because he felt that his muscles needed more exercise (years later he would admit to having suffered from vigorexia), when he was not partying in Hong Kong with the guard that the studio had hired to control him or touring Thailand with Minogue.

Columbia offered him a three-film deal for € 30 million.

Van Damme asked for 50. He wanted to match the then highest paid actor in the world, Jim Carrey.

“I was shooting movie after movie, non-stop promoting them.

I was tired.

Everything he did paid off.

Jim Carrey was paid a fortune, so I wanted to play on the system.

What an idiot.

They put me on a blacklist and my career is over ”, he would admit years later to the British newspaper

.

Meanwhile, their marriage collapsed from excesses.

In the mid-1990s, Van Damme was spending 8,500 euros a day on cocaine (he confessed that he snorted 10 grams a day, in shifts of "two lines the size of the highway between Los Angeles and Tijuana").

He assures that he was so cramped during the filming of

that he does not remember working on it.

“I did it out of lust, for sex, to keep holding on.

I stopped training, I lost weight, I lost my muscles.

I destroyed the body I had created ”, he would explain.

The actor paid 10,000 euros a month in rent, had a mansion in Monaco and invited his family to the shoots to show them that leaving Belgium had been a good idea.

His wife spent 2,000 euros a month on cosmetic treatments and another 2,000 on telephone bills.

Van Damme gave him an 80,000 euro sapphire and hired a team of servants to attend to his every need.

When Darcy denounced him for hitting her on her silicone implants, after which she required surgical intervention, he defended himself by assuring that he had no medical documents, that the violent partner was her and that if he had attacked her he would have killed her.

His divorce resulted in one of the highest severance payments in California at the time: a pension of 100,000 euros a month.

After spending only six days in rehab and concluding that his best therapy was taking refuge in the gym, Van Damme was diagnosed with bipolar and manic-depressive disorder.

Then he understood all the suicidal thoughts that had assailed him during his glory years.

The actor returned with Gladys Portugues, with whom he has continued ever since.

"I lost my fame because of my own stupidity, but I promised my mother that before she died I would take her back to a big premiere in a big screen cinema," explained the actor.

At the end of the nineties, Van Damme continued with his delusions of grandeur, promising that his new film would be “like

in the Legion” and the next one “like

in the West”, but neither

nor

lasted longer. of a week on the bill.

In 1999, while the

reinvented action cinema,

lost 50 million euros at the box office, confirming that brute force cinema was a relic of a video store.

"It's okay, today's televisions have plasmas that transmit electromagnetic love," he said then.

Van Damme never gave up and kept filming in the most remote provinces of Europe knowing that there would always be someone who would want to see him hand out hosts.

“Everybody understands punching,” he explained.

“In Japan, Belgium or America, a slap is a slap.

I am not a movie star.

I am a brand.

Van Damme is like Levi's.

Wherever I go people know me by my name, not by my films.

Of course, no one knows of any of his films from recent years.

Titles like

,

,

or

were piled on with sequels to

and

(where he appeared alongside Christopher Lambert, Mike Tyson and Ronaldinho) until

arrived

.

In that

French

the actor played himself and culminated in a monologue looking at the camera in which he cried while reflecting: “It's not my fault that I dreamed of being a star.

When you're at the top you just want more.

My dream came true and I realized that it meant nothing.

Today I still wonder what I have done on this planet.

Nothing.

I did nothing".

After decades of beating up the bad guys, Van Damme beat himself into a role, that of a finished action star, which he had been perfecting for 20 years.

critic

Richard Corliss hailed his work as the second best of the year, after Heath Ledger's in

.

Since then, Van Damme has spent a decade exploiting the nostalgia for the male fantasy that he embodied: documentaries,

(his character was the villain, so his name was Jean Vilain),

, commercials (his “epic leg opening ”For an

advertising

supported by two Volvo trucks, he broke records in 2015 with 35 million views on YouTube in a week, now has more than 100) and an Amazon series,

, in which he satirized his own misery.

Amazon organized a premiere in style in a Paris cinema: Jean-Claude Van Damme returned to the big screen thanks to a television platform.

And he, of course, went to the premiere accompanied by his mother.

In the series,

Van Damme's

starred in a mamporrera adaptation of

and

bottom when Steven Seagal took a role from him.

This self-awareness and sense of parody is what has ended up saving Jean-Claude Van Damme from his own demons.

Instead of trying to cling to his past glory, he has ridiculed the hyperbolic manhood he embodied.

In 2016, he recreated his

dance on Conan O'Brien's show

The video accumulates more than 44 million views.

The reason O'Brien asked him to dance was because those

wiggles are

so comical that they have been viralized several times accompanied by different songs (the most popular is the one that makes him dance to the rhythm of

).

Another meme that periodically resurfaces is the one in the video where Van Damme dances with a hostess from a Brazilian show and his jeans are so tight that they can't hide his erection, that he tries to cover himself in embarrassment.

Or, in Spain, the video of his participation in

kicking the air to the delight of Antonia dell'Atte and Chiquito de la Calzada.

A few months ago Van Damme starred in the AaRon

video clip

.

In it, he continued to show off a superhuman physical form and danced halfway between elegance and embarrassment, but above all, enjoying every second.

When Brussels commemorated his prodigal son with a bronze statue, the actor wished that "when people look at this statue they will not see Jean-Claude Van Damme, but a kid on the street who had a dream and got it."

The happy ending to this story is not only that, at 60, Jean-Claude Van Damme remains what he always wanted: famous.

The happy ending is that he lived to tell the tale.

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