Interview: Matt Mullins of “Kamen Rider Dragon Knight”

Late October, gaijINside got a chance to do a phone interview with Matt Mullins, one of the starts of Kamen Rider Dragon Knight. In the show, he plays Len/Kamen Rider Wing Knight, one of the few heroes to have survived from Ventara. What follows is a 30-minute phone interview with the martial artist, head of the Sideswipe group, and one of the key figures in Extreme Martial Arts.

For the uninformed, what’s extreme about Extreme Martial Arts?
Extreme Martial Arts is a combination of all different styles of martial arts with gymnastics, acrobatics, and dance added in. The thing that makes it extreme is the movements are very acrobatic. There’s a lot of twisting and flipping involved in this performance style.

It’s almost more of a dance?
Yeah, definitely, it’s more of an art. The thing that makes it difference than a dance routine or a gymnastics routine is that, in theory, you should be able to at least hit somebody with these. It’s not exactly the most practical; you wouldn’t go up to somebody, flip four times in the air, and kick them. But, there is a practical application to each one of the movements. We can actually break boards and hit paddles with them.

You wouldn’t really teach it as a self-defense.
No, absolutely not. Not a self-defense style.

How did you get in to martial arts yourself?
I got into martial arts when I was 13 years old. I was always a huge martial arts fan; when I was younger, I was a huge fan of Karate Kid, and then when Ninja Turtles came out, I was just so stoked about Ninja Turtles. My favorite show, I had the sheets, the bedspread, the toys… I was crazy about Ninja Turtles. And I would even go into my backyard and make Ninja Turtle weapons with ropes and sticks and anything I had. I always wanted to learn martial arts, when I lived in Chicago, I started at a school called Sharkey’s Karate, which was really close to my house, so I’d be able to walk. And when I walked by, there was a picture of a Ninja Turtle in the window, and I thought the instructor was a Ninja Turtle. It turns out the instructor was a guy named Larry Lam, who instructed my instructor, John Sharkey.

It wasn’t Splinter training you?
It wasn’t Splinter. Actually, if you pull a picture of John Sharkey, he actually looks a little bit like Splinter. Short, compact, he’d just spring out and grab you. He’s a pretty amazing character; he’d spar, he didn’t really stretch out, but he’d get you so fast. The study I started in was Shorei-ryu, Japanese style of martial arts, and from there, the Open Competition is where the whole Extreme Martial Arts started. In Open Competition, everyone was allowed to change their routines and change their forms and add in different movements and flow, and it kinda evolved into what you see today.

Well, one of my writers will kill me if I don’t ask you this now: who was your favorite Ninja Turtle?
Leonardo. I always felt myself to be the “leader” type character. I always liked Michalangelo because he was cool and a good attitude. Donatello was my favorite because in all the video games, he was the best character. He had the longest weapon, and he was the strongest character. Leonardo had the swords and I always had to be the leader when we played.

I was always Raphael back on the Super Nintendo.
In the arcade one, you could do the roll and kick. In the Super Nintendo, there were so many games. There were so many games, man. I played them all; they were just great.

So, if I’ve done my research correctly, you’ve worked with Michael Chaturantabut…
They call him “Mike Chat” for short.

Well, he was once the Blue Lightspeed Rescue Power Ranger. Who would win in a fight, Len or the Blue Ranger (Chad Lee, almost a namesake with this writer)
It’s funny, we did a YouTube clip on this. In my opinion, the Kamen Riders would win, and Len would win, for a couple reasons. That’s being completely unbiased, of course. I normally say they would just destroy each other, but the Kamen Riders were originally created, if I understand correctly, were the original versions of the Power Rangers, and the Power Rangers were created to make it a watered-down version, because it was too violent, like Kamen Rider was still violent in Japan. In order to bring it to America, they had to water down the series when Power Rangers came out. So, obviously, the Power Rangers don’t have too many tactical and destructive moves as the Kamen Riders, and they have a lot more different powers than the Ranger have. I would have to give the Kamen Riders this win.

Well, they’ve got the giant robot. Can you take down a giant robot?
Well, I think so. The Final Vents are pretty strong. The Survive Mode Vents are pretty massive.

Speaking of toys, how does it feel to have a toy of yourself?
(laughs) It’s pretty awesome. I just moved into a place in Studio City, California, and I have my Ninja Turtles on the wall, and on the end, I have my action figures. It’s kind of a cool thing; I have all the original ones in the packages.

Your action figure can hang out with the Turtles now?
Yes, my action figure is hanging with the Ninja Turtles at the moment.

It’s a childhood dream come true.
Yeah, it’s awesome. I’m really stoked. And plus, all my Christmas shopping is done for this year. Everyone’s getting a signed Len action figure for Christmas.

Nice. That’s not egotistical at all.
(laughs). No. Well, everyone wanted one; it’s a hot item.

It’s a big seller. They just announced the December toys.
Yeah, I can’t wait to look forward to the new ones. I can’t wait for the Xaviax toy… I used to watch Voltron a lot when I was a little kid, and it was hard to find all the cool robeasts to play against. They need to have bad guys, or else, who are you going to fight against? It was hard for me find a General Kragg for Ninja Turtles; I had a Beebop and Rocksteady, but it was hard to find Shredder and Kragg and stuff like that.

I remember having a Baxter Stockman myself. The fly guy. Back to martial arts, where did Sideswipe get it’s start?
I was originally, when I moved to California, began doing choreography for smaller shows, and the choreographer came up to me and asked if we’d be interested in doing a show for Diesel. I got a couple of my buddies to come out and perform for the show, and we had such a huge response. This version of martial arts, it’s cool because it was unseen. It had the strength and power of martial arts and the grace and energy of what dance routines bring, and we got such a massive response, that “Hey, this is a good thing, we’ll try to keep it going” And then from there, we did a show on FOX called 30 Seconds To Fame back in 2003. And we won the show, and we won 25,000 dollars, and from that we started performing different shows. The Wayne Brady Show, The Ellen Show… we ended up competing on the Steve Harvey’s Big Time, and we won three weeks on that show, then we did Tom Joyner, we did a whole bunch of morning shows in LA, the WGN morning show, and off there we competed on America’s Got Talent, and we ended up talking top eigth in the series. From there, it’s just been crazy. We’ve done everything from motion capture for video games to commercials. Right now, the majority of the team is on tour with Britney Spears, choreographed and doing routines for the show, and they’ve been touring around for the last seven months.

Well, speaking of video games, did you have anything to do with the Kamen Rider Dragon Knight video games?
We did not. The engines that were made for it were already pre-designed, and then the majority of the Vent techniques, they were just animated, they were just created. So, we didn’t have anything to do with the video game, but I did play it, and it’s awesome. I was really hoping they would do… you play the Adventure Mode where you fight the other riders, and there’s a little bit of story, but I was really hoping for a side-scrolling game.

An old school teenage mutant Ninja Turtle game.
Right. Like Ninja Turtles or Streets of Rage. I loved those video games, man. I played those for hours.

Nothing beats a good old marathon session of Final Fight. So, as a martial artist, what’s your favorite martial arts movie and fight scene. You’ve gotta have something you love.
Mmm… that’s a good one… that’s tough. Okay, I will have to say Jackie Chan has the most amazing fight scene in Operation Condor 2, where he’s fighting the big women.

You’re going obscure there, man.
It’s very obscure, but as actual amazing movements and practical technique goes, that was amazing. My favorite modern day action sequence is the fight in Equilibrium. Even though it’s a gun battle, the actual choreography and the movements were amazing. Christian Bale did a great job; he looked amazing in that film

The Gun Kata battles were great.
Yeah, they were great. I’m surprised they never came out with another film like that, because it was just outstanding.

It got Christian Bale out there for Batman, so we got something good out of it.
Absolutely. The action sequences in Batman are so… you don’t expect Batman to be jumping and kicking, but I didn’t care too much for the choreography in The Dark Knight. Equilibrium has just amazing fight sequences, and I’m just a big fan of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, there fight in… ah… what was the film they just did together (Forbidden Kingdom)

The one where they train the kid or something.
Right. The one where they fought each other, that was a pretty decent fight too. The thing about the big-screen martial arts that we do, that when you’re in a fantasy world, you have fantastical powers. It makes sense. When you’re in the real world, you want to see that could possibly be real, you could possibly hit people with, and that’s what I like about a lot of Jackie Chan stuff. It’s not just wire-fu. It’s not just people flying through the air, he may be flying through the air, but we could feasibly see Jackie Chan doing it. I really like that type of choreography. When people in real life start flying through the air, it kinda loses me a little bit. As an aside, I’m not a huge fan of the MMA fighting that they’re trying to do in movies. If it’s done creatively, it works really well, but people are trying to stick to a certain mentality. It just doesn’t, in my opinion, work quite as well because it’s a little boring to watch, it’s a little… there’s no way you can make an MMA fight look as good and with as high stakes as a real fight. You really don’t know what’s going to happen in a real fight. In the movie, you have a certain idea of what’s going to happen… the stakes aren’t quite as high, at least for me. Now,, this is coming form a martial arts point of view, an actor point of view, not necessarily from a general audience member.

Knowing more about the inside of it than the general populace.
Right. I’m sure when directors watch movies too, they’re like “oh yeah, the color correction’s way off” Stuff that I would never know about foley art “yeah, that crunch didn’t really sound like a crunch”. Everyone has their own opinions and biases.

Now, what’s your favorite moment of Kamen Rider?
Ah, well… I think my favorite moments are coming up. Some of the sequences, the storyline is changing up, really takes some great turns during the entire season, and a lot of my favorite things are coming up in the last ten episodes. The fights get much more intense, the way that everything comes down is just pretty awesome. I was really excited about reading it when we were shooting; we’d only get three scripts at a time, so we didn’t know the entire series. So, the second I’d get my scripts, I’d read through each of my scripts immediately, since it made me so excited about what was going on, that I would ask Steve Wang “what happens next? what happens next?” It was just very exciting to read it all. Some of my favorite parts in the series… I love Power Rangers, I grew up watching a lot of Power Rangers stuff, and I loved the action sequences. The thing is, I liked the diversity in the characters. Just like in Ninja Turtles, you could identify with each one of your characters. With Power Rangers, especially in the beginning, you could identify with the Red Ranger, the Yellow Ranger, the Blue Ranger. Kamen Rider, it’s very similar, because you can connect with each of those characters. Who are you? Are you a Kit, are you a Len, are you an Incisor? All the characters are so so different, have different personalities. One of the things we tried to do on the show was to accentuate those qualities. Everyone has a motorcycle, a street bike, on the show, and everyone had a different motorcycle. That was pretty cool, everyone had a real specific characteristic that different people could identify with and made them unique. That’s why I like the show as well.

A lot of people like the show, obviously. It’s getting dubbed in Japanese. How’s it feel to be dubbed by the guy who played your equivalent in Kamen Rider Ryuki? Did you get to see any of his work?
The gentleman who played Ren was… I didn’t watch Ryuki when we were shooting, but I went back and watched it after we finished, and he was such a great character. He really had that vibe of a badass guy who had been through it, who had been through the game of what Kamen Rider was before. Him sorta taking this kid under his wing really had a nice contrast. He was really good in the role; to have him doing my voice is really cool, that he came back and did it again. The series is really different, but it’s still cool that we both got to play the same character for two completely different markets.

Now, how much time did you get to spend in the suit?
Actually, I never did any work in the suit. The suits were so made for Japanese performers, there’s no way that I could fit in that. The guy who doubled in the suit was about a foot shorter than I was, because the costumes were so tight that it was difficult… I’m kind of a big dude, I’m 6′1″ and 200 pounds. There’s no way I was getting my legs into those pants. The production schedule was very… we shot… they shot a lot of the footage, the action sequences, here in America, so they were always shooting two units. If I wasn’t acting, I was on green screen doing work there. If I wasn’t doing green screen, I was doing voice over. If I wasn’t doing voice over, I was shooting. They kept us really really busy during the nine months of production that we did.

Speaking of the length of time, you’re the longest actor committed to the project, going back to the original pilot. Outside of the cast, what’s changed behind the scenes in the three years or so you’ve worked on this?
Well, a lot has changed. The Wang Bros, when they took on the project had a little bit different vision from what the show was originally. I think they really wanted to make a dark and edgy series and they had to pull back from that just a tad, because they really wanted to make it like the original series. They pulled back from what the original series was just a little bit, not a ton, but just a little bit. They really wanted to make a good show that, all the people watching, could root for their favorite Kamen Riders, and to see them be Vented, they wanted to have an emotional response. For the audience to get that to happen, they had to create situations where you really cared for the characters. So, the overall theme of the project had to be pulled back a little bit. It’s the same thing Power Rangers had to do, and a lot of other shows had to do. Nowadays, you can get away with a lot more, as compared to fifteen/twenty years ago. So, they watered down their vision a little bit, but stayed very true to what they wanted to do. As far as the cast members switching, both actors in the pilot were amazing actors, really really talented. Like, I really loved working with him, and we all felt very fortunate to be doing the pilot. We had no idea that when it got picked up that it was going to be picked up, and they talked about recasting all of us. So, I was very lucky and fortunate to be kept on the show. Stephen Lunsford and Aria are both great actors too, are both very talented young actors that the strength of the cast came through. The biggest thing from the pilot to the series is that the series obviously had more money,we could do bigger things for effects and make everything look to the next level, to our ability. Working with Steve Wang, he really was the heart and soul of the project. Same thing with Mike Wang, it really shows, and they spent so much time making it look the best as they could do with what they had to work with, and I think it really shows. Everyone on the set really wanted the show to be as awesome as the original Kamen Rider series, and they put in the work accordingly. Not really much changed from the pilot and the series; we’ve wanted to make the series as big as possible, and I think it really came through.

Speaking of the crew, what’s the last time you and the crew worked together? Have you hung out with anyone outside of the production?
Yeah, absolutely. We actually went down to ComicCon, and we did a little thing down at comic con where we did a panel about the show, and that really fun. I ran into the girl that plays Siren, Carrie Reichenbach, once in a while and we hang out. The girl that plays Lacie, we’ve talked quite a bit. Lunsford, the directors Steve and Mike, I see them on occasion. Mark Allen, there’s a couple improve classes we take that he’s at. It’s pretty fun. Everyone’s trying to work on different projects and things, to take things to another level, to try other things. So, we’re all trying to put something together. We’ll see what happens next.

So, how many kids have recognized you so far, and how’s it feel?
When we go out to places, it’s pretty fun. When we go to events, a lot of people will look at me and recognize me, it’s pretty fun. All the shows I saw as a kid, if I ever saw those people on the street, it just inspired me more. So, for me, I’m glad I can hopefully lead a good example for kids and everyone else to really do their best, follow their dreams, and be good people. I feel very happy and important to be in a position where I can inspire the youth of tomorrow. With Sideswipe, and I still teach, I still train kids, and I want to inspire the next generation of world champions and youth of tomorrow, so it feels really great to be able to do that.

This is the big question everyone wants to know. Is Kamen Rider Dragon Knight the last we see of Len?
Hmm… that is a good question. First of all, you’ll have to wait until the end of the series to see what happens, but whatever happens, you can really change anything in the next season. If the show continues to be popular and we begin to see a lot of talk about the show, then I’m sure there will be another series, and I’m sure there’ll be flashbacks, callbacks, to what’s going on. But that’s a question I honestly can’t answer at this moment, because nobody’s exactly sure. As the series draws closer to the fortieth episode, we’ll see what Bandai and what Adness Entertainment does with the show. I want say “Yes.”

Last question. A lot of fans of the Japanese show, which gaijINside’s viewers have seen, are slightly disappointed that the series breaks a tradition of Kamen Rider. Can you give us a “HENSHIN!”?
Henshin! We talked about that a lot in the series, why we didn’t do that, and in the pilot, they tried to do like an American version of “henshin”, and I don’t think it necessarily translated… it came off a little corny when we were tying to do it, so we just said “Kamen Rider” and that was our “henshin”, but I love the henshin. I wish we really could have kept it. I think it’s kinda cool; we’re already saying “Kamen Rider”, when everyone says “Cayman Rider”.

Or the joke that everyone says “Common Rider”, and of course we’re not going to talk about Masked Rider from the 90s.
Right, that’s what they really wanted to stay away from. But, it would have been cool to do the “henshin” for the show.