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"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."