Karate champ gets his kicks with Wesley Snipes
December 14, 2004
By Caroline Harrison
Forget American action stars with stunt doubles, a local karate instructor is set to take Tinseltown by storm.
Hennie Bosman from Bellville stars in the new Wesley Snipes action film, The Painter, filming of which wrapped in Romania last Wednesday.
In the film, which is expected to be released within the next eight months to a year, Bosman pays a Chechen rebel who tries to blow up a Russian nuclear plant. Snipes plays the American who tries to stop him.
Bosman, a seventh-dan and a world karate champion, landed the part in the Snipes film after working on the Jean-Claude van Damme movie, Wake of Death, last year.
The 1.98m-tall Bosman said his movie career started last year when local actor André Jacobs advised him to go for the Wake of Death casting.
"I walked in on the right day because they were looking for a baddie and when I fight I look mean," he said at his Kyokushin-Karateka dojo in Welgemoed yesterday.
Bosman, who has been a karateka for 40 years, since the age of nine, says there is a vast difference between karate in the dojo and doing it on screen.
"In karate, you don't show pain; you have a poker face. In the movies it's different and that's what I had to learn. Everything is overdone in the movies," he said.
He said the climactic 30-second fight sequence between him and Snipes took seven hours to complete.
"Wesley, being a professional, makes you look better on screen. He is very polite and even bowed to me in the traditional kyokushin way.
"He kept his distance a bit, but he came up and spoke to me," Bosman said.
Despite his newfound fame, Bosman does not plan to leave the peace of his Welgemoed dojo for the bright lights of Hollywood any time soon.
"I don't want to give up karate for the movies, I'll use the movies to promote the dojo," he said.
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