India — Vidyut Jammwal Says the Gap Between Indian and Hollywood Action Is the Schedule, Not the Crew
- Vidyut Jammwal says Indian and Hollywood action films draw on the same pool of technicians.
- What India shoots in ten days, he says, Hollywood shoots in four months.
- On “Street Fighter” he found that nothing could be performed unless it was written down first.
Posted: October 11, 2026
Fifteen years into a career built on Hindi, Tamil and Telugu action, Vidyut Jammwal has made his first Hollywood picture, and the comparison he draws has nothing to do with talent. “We work with the same technicians as they do, and there is no difference. In my movies, I’ve worked with the best in the world and they are the same people who work over there,” he told PTI. “I think the difference is that what we shoot in 10 days, they shoot in four months. The liberty of time, the luxury of spending too much time to create something is what they have that we don’t normally use.” His counter-example is domestic: the Baahubali films took their time, and it reads on screen.
That is a scheduling argument with a direct cost to any action department. Ten days versus four months is the difference between rehearsing a sequence into shape and shooting the first version that is safe enough to roll — and the squeeze lands hardest on the people taking the contact, who absorb an under-rehearsed gag with their bodies rather than with a reshoot.
The second difference he names is paperwork, and he does not frame it as a nuisance. “They are very well planned. Their insurance laws are very different from ours. Like, you cannot do anything that is not on paper.” His example is almost comic in scale: he likes to rollerblade back to his hotel after a day’s work, and got a letter from the production’s legal team pointing out he could be injured. The underlying principle — that an unscheduled, undocumented physical risk is simply not permitted — is the same one that produces a written risk assessment for every gag, and it is the regime Indian productions working to a ten-day action schedule largely do not operate under.
On the work itself, Jammwal plays Dhalsim, and says Kitao Sakurai cast him to bring what he already owns rather than build something new: the character is a martial artist and a Kalaripayattu practitioner, and Jammwal is trained in Kalaripayattu, so “I didn’t have to prepare for anything, I just needed to know a lot more about the game.” He says the director approached him after researching his body of work. Street Fighter opens in India on October 16 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. He is also developing an action film with Tiger Shroff, with no director attached yet.
Learn more on IMDb: Street Fighter (2026) · Vidyut Jammwal
