From Chow Yun-fat to a talking teddy, it's hard to keep up with the roles of an
SIMON Broad could easily suffer from a multiple personality disorder, or at least an identity crisis. You see, some days he wakes up to find he is Chow Yun-fat. On others, he is Bruce Lee. And in the same week - sometimes even in the same day - he might also discover he is Andy Lau Tak-wah, Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
Although Broad's mind might sound like rich terrain for a thorough psychiatric probing, he is not mad. 'Well, not completely mad, anyway,' he says.
Rather, he is Hong Kong's viceroy of the voice-over; the doyen of dubbers. For the past 17 years, the New Zealand-born thespian has been the English-language voice of just about any male Cantonese star - and probably the odd female one - that you care to name.
He has grunted and aaaiiieeeyyaaed and growled and gurgled and shrieked through more chop socky films than you could shake a set of nunchaku at. He has reached down to the depths of his soul to try to find a voice to match the stealthy slaughter of some creeping ninja. He has roared as Godzilla rampaged, and even oohed and oh-baby-ed his way through the odd Category III flesh-fest.
Once these films, ranging from the good to (more often) the egregious, are dubbed in English, they are sent off to all manner of weird places. 'Half the time we haven't a clue where the movies are going,' says Broad. 'It's all for the overseas video market - you know, the sort of thing you'd see in a bus in Pakistan.' The bad news for Broad is that he now presides over a crumbling empire. With the local film industry languishing in the doldrums and a slice of stars and directors having scarpered for Hollywood, there simply are not that many movies left to dub.
'I guess in a way it's the end of an era,' says Broad, who operates his own company, Two Guys, with fellow actor Jack Murphy. 'There's really only a handful of us left doing dubbing these days.' When he arrived in Hong Kong in 1981 as a callow 17-year-old from Wellington, the big trend was ninjas.