Jackie Chan isn't afraid of much. Pointing to body parts that have been bruised, broken and banged up during his long career as an action star in Hong Kong, he takes pride in his war wounds.

"Here I've been broken -- twice," he says, pointing to his elbows, "and my scalp, and both arms, here, broken, broken, broken," he laughs, relaxed and intact last week at a New York hotel. "All over my body."

Chan's healthy enough to visit Toronto today. He was promoting his autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, at Chapters on Bloor St. Last night, he presented his next chopsocky production, Rush Hour, at the Uptwon Theatre. The movie opens theatrically in a few weeks.

As Chan recounts in his book, most North Americans got their first taste of Chan's exotic leaps and lunges in Rumble In The Bronx, a sleeper hit. But fans of the Hong Kong Kung-fu classics know that Chan was a film fight co-ordinator in the '60s, then part-time actor before he launched a career of his own in the late '70s as a comic version of the serious Bruce Lee.

But for all his stunts, which he usually performs net-free and without padding, there was one feat that made Chan sweat in the '80s.

"I never had the guts to make American films," says the 44-year-old, whose pre-Rumble movies weren't as popular in North America as they were in Asia.

"It destroyed my confidence. So I said, 'No more American market. Back to Asia and do my own films.' "

Now, he's back, playing his martial arts, Zen-like fish out of water schtick to the hilt.

In Rush Hour, a sort of Beverly Hills Cop meets, well, Jackie Chan, Chan and comedian Chris Tucker make good as two cops from different worlds working the streets of Los Angeles.

His on-screen chemistry with co-star Tucker, says Chan, is the chemistry of opposites the two felt off-screen.

"When I first met him, he kept talking and talking," says Chan, of the wise-cracking, street-smart Tucker.

"After 15 minutes, when he went to the bathroom, I said to the director, 'I don't understand a word he's saying!' And Chris didn't know what I was saying either. I'm slow, he's fast.

"But then I thought, this is good. He'll do the speaking comedy, and I'll do the action comedy."

To come out of hiding to make his first "100% American film," says Chan, he had to ensure a few other details too.

As is the case with Chan films, there are "No sex scenes, a lot of action but no violence, and don't show the blood," says Chan, who counts on kids as his biggest audience. "I wanted it to be happy-go-lucky."

But you'll still see typical Chan acrobatics, including dangling from a Hollywood street sign suspended in air and scaling buildings in a single bound.

And with positive buzz for this film, he says, and his newly-published autobiography hitting bookstores, Hollywood is finally coming to him.

Currently writing a script for Chan is America's own action guy, Sylvester Stallone, who erred on his first draft by sketching Chan a bad-guy drug dealer part.

"I told him I won't do it," says Chan, concerned with losing face in his homeland.

"I don't want to play a bad guy. If I played a drug dealer," he shakes his head, worried, "the whole Asian audience would never forgive me."


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