VietNamNet Bridge – The action film Huyen Thoai Bat Tu (The Legend Is Alive) opens nationwide today, and overseas Vietnamese star Dustin Nguyen calls his role as an idiot savant with superb martial arts skills “the most difficult of my career”.

Rave reviews: A scene from The Legend Is Alive.

Nguyen has also appeared in Dong Mau Anh Hung (The Rebel), a French-Vietnamese production set in the 1920s, and he played the romantic lead in Sai Gon Nhat Thuc (Sai Gon Eclipse), a modern day love-story. He also appeared in Oliver Stone’s 1993 film Heaven and Earth.

But his most noteworthy role was in the critically acclaimed Little Fish in 2005 opposite Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to become the number-one film in Australia. Along the way, it collected five Australian Film Institute Awards and three Film Critics Awards. Little Fish then opened in New York to rave reviews. Critics there noted Nguyen’s performance and transformation into a leading man among the A-list cast.

Most recently, he has starred in Justin Lin’s latest, Finishing the Game, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. In this comedy, set in the 1970s, Nguyen played an out-of-work actor in a casting call to replace the deceased Bruce Lee in the unfinished film, Game of Death.

Following The Legend Is Alive, Nguyen will make his directorial debut with Lua Phat (Monk On Fire).

(Source: Viet Nam News)