- Sandra E. Kessler
- Sep 23, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 28, 2024
On October 10th, 2024, notable martial artist Mark Dacascos will be inducted into the prestigious Black Belt Hall of Fame, honored with our Martial Arts Entertainment Award. To celebrate this achievement, we’re revisiting the 1995 Mark Dacascos interview featured in Black Belt Magazine, where this emerging talent shared his journey and passion for martial arts.
Dive in for an incredible glimpse into martial arts entertainment history!
Mark Dacascos, martial artist and movie star, is a man of many faces. In his budding film career, this dreamy-eyed Adonis has played a variety of roles, from a Latino lover/car thief, to a Filipino avenger, to a Japanese samurai warrior. Hindered in the past by his nondescript looks, Dacascos was told that he was too ethnic-looking for Caucasian roles and too white for Asian parts. But this 30-year-old actor of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Irish and Spanish descent, is beginning to use his unique looks to explore many personas.
"It's harder for an audience to track me because I don't know if they'll recognize me half the time," Dacascos says. "But I'm an actor. And for me, it's great because I'm going from adult to kid to bad guy to good guy. And I try to physically change my looks every single time, which is fun."
Dacascos who has done some modeling in the past broke into acting by playing Conan the Barbarian at the Universal Studios show in Universal City, California. He claims the part gave him a tremendous amount of discipline because he had to constantly find fresh approaches to a routine that he performed 20 times a week for five years. "It was the perfect training," says Dacascos, who studied liberal arts at Valley College in Van Nuys, California, and Chinese and drama at Portland State University. "I performed four to five times a day in front of several thousand people. It was a lot of fun, but it was grueling work."
The Conan role led to a number of television parts, including a 10-month stint as an Asian gang member on General Hospital, and Dacascos has now appeared in six movies—Dim Sum, American Samurai, Roosters, Drag Strip Girl, Only the Strong, and the recently released Double Dragon.
In the 1993 release Only the Strong, Dacascos plays an ex-Special Forces officer who tries to reform a rebellious group of high school students by teaching them capoeira, a rhythmic, dance-like Afro-Brazilian martial art. Because of his gymnastic background, Dacascos adapted easily to capoeira, which features handstands, cartwheels and flips which are used to set up leg strikes and evade opponents' attacks.
Dacascos, who performed all of his own stunts in the movie, studied capoeira for only two months before filming. Although he has extensive background in kajukenbo and wun hop kuen do—the systems taught by his noted father Al Dacascos—young Dacascos was so taken by capoeira and his instructor Amen Santo that he continued to train in the system for more than a year after the movie's completion.
Although audiences might not always see the difference, Dacascos believes actors should perform their own stunts whenever possible, and he is proud of the hard work he put into learning capoeira. "As far as all the acrobatics off the cars, the butterfly twists and everything in the movie, that was me," Dacascos claims. "My teacher, Amen, kicked my butt for months before the show. I had bloody toes, I was hurting every single day. I worked hard for that, so I want to make sure people know that it was me."
In his latest film, Double Dragon, Dacascos and co-star Scott Wolf play teenage brothers who are forced to battle a power-hungry villain and roving bands of gangsters in an anarchic, earthquake-ravaged Los Angeles in the year 2007. Geared toward young adults, the film explores the lighter, more comic aspect of youths surviving in a dysfunctional world.
"It's a kids' movie, but we deal with things that are very pertinent in Los Angeles today—gangs, pollution, the environment and, of course, earthquakes," Dacascos relates. "So it's just another way of looking at what life could be like if we don't really take it into our own hands."
Double Dragon, based on the popular arcade game, also features Robert Patrick (who appeared in Terminator II), Alyssa Milano (from the TV show Who's the Boss) and Julia Nickson, and includes a "sizzling display of martial arts."
Dacascos admits that his early acting roles came easily, but says his career now takes constant work. "I go to acting classes every week and still have my bad days," he says. "You can't sit and wait for people to call you. There are too many people out there who are just as talented as you are."
Dacascos credits his martial arts skills for some of the breaks he's received as an actor, but says martial artists have a reputation for being inexperienced actors, so he never mentioned his training in early auditions for fear of being typecast as just another "wanna-be."
"I want to be an actor and a martial artist, not a martial arts actor," Dacascos states. "Of course martial arts is not a bad thing; I credit it with keeping my head and heart focused. But, ideally, I'd like to do both, together or separately."
In an industry which refers to auditions as "cattle calls," a fledgling actor can easily get lost in the crowd and grow frustrated. Dacascos works on staying focused even if he is turned down for a role. Sometimes there is a thin line between reality and illusion in the movie industry, as Dacascos discovered during the filming of Drag Strip Girl.
"I was coming home from a location shoot late one night," Dacascos relates. "I had my sunroof open, and had rock-'n'-roll music blaring. The movie was based in the 1950s, and I played a West Side Story-type of character, and I had this butterfly feeling in my stomach like 'Wow, this is cool. I'm in love. I'm in love.' And I had to slow down and catch myself and say 'Whoa, that was not you Mark, that was [my movie character] Johnny.' That's really freaky when you catch yourself doing that."
Dacascos, a third-degree black belt in wun hop kuen do, began his martial arts training at the age of 4. Wun hop kuen do, a derivative of kajukenbo, was founded by Dacascos' father, a member of the Black Belt Hall of Fame. The younger Dacascos won his first international tournament title at 9 years old and continued to compete throughout Europe until the age of 18.
Being the son of two prominent martial artists—both his father and mother (Malia Bernal) were nationally rated forms competitors—wasn't easy, Mark claims, and he eventually felt a need to take time off from the martial arts. "I was just kind of losing interest," he recalls. "I didn't figure out until about six months ago that it was hard for me to have my father as my teacher."
During his hiatus from wun hop kuen do, Dacascos worked out with weights, competed on the Valley College gymnastic team, and studied capoeira with Santo. Then, last January, Dacascos started studying kung fu with Jiang Hao Quan, who teaches wushu, northern Chinese shaolin, chin na and shuai chiao. Dacascos claims martial arts will always be a part of his life, whether or not it's part of his acting career.
He says he is constantly amazed at the vast amount of knowledge the martial arts has to offer. "I'm 30 years old and I've seen martial arts all my life. But every time I look around, I'll see somebody else perform or see another style, and it just reiterates to me that I could live to be 1,000 years old and not see or learn everything that's out there," Dacascos marvels. "When I did American Samurai, it was the first time I ever did Japanese sword work, and I thought it was amazing. Then I did some capoeira and I thought it was amazing. And now I'm studying with this new kung fu teacher, and there are over 300 styles of kung fu, and I'm thinking 'How could anybody say which style is the best?' They are all fantastic."
Born in Hawaii, Dacascos lived in Hamburg, West Germany, throughout his teens. Although he had a hard time adjusting to the language, food, and mentality of the people, he values the education he received, and now speaks fluent German. The move also strengthened his interest in the martial arts.
"They didn't really have P.E. classes," he relates. "It was very academic, which is a good thing, and now I really treasure it. But at the time, I just thought it was awful. The only place I felt secure and at peace was at my mom and dad's martial arts studio."
Being the son of two prominent martial artists, Dacascos says he felt pressure to perform well in competition, and he claims his opponents were more determined to beat him because of who he was. "When I had the name 'Dacascos' on my back, they wanted to kill me," he remarks. "But it was fun."
Dacascos abandoned tournament competition for nearly eight years, but fought in Germany one last time when he flew overseas to watch his father's tournament three years ago.
"Apparently somebody leaked to the press that I was going to be there and that I was going to fight," he recalls. "So I thought 'What the heck, I'll fight.' He flew from Los Angeles to Germany the day before the tournament and got little sleep that night. "I had five fights the next morning and made it to the finals," Dacascos says. "I had to at least do well; I couldn't lose face for my father and for myself."
The title bout was tied, 3-3, at the end of regulation, requiring an overtime period. "We both scored one point in overtime, forcing a sudden-death overtime where the first point wins. My legs were tired, my hands were really tired, and I thought 'You know what, I've done OK. It doesn't matter what happens.' And just like that—boom! I lost. So it just shows you that the mind really wills the body. I gave up in my head, so I ended up taking second place. But I thought 'That's not bad for somebody who didn't train at all.'"
