Morgan Benoit the amazing Stateside martial artist plays the character Lupo in The Forbidden Kingdom and gets to battle a certain older Jackie Chan amongst others.

Morgan is from Burlington Vermont, a very small American city. He started training in Tae Kwon Do at a young age but didn’t take martial arts seriously until he discovered Shaolin Kung Fu when he was 15 years old at the Vermont Kung Fu Academy.

He came to China for the first time when he was 18 to participate in a Yin Style Bagua seminar held in Beijing. After returning to Vermont he knew right away that he wanted to move back to Beijing and learn the Chinese langauge and martial arts full time.

After spending almost a year in the States he finally got enough money together to make it back to Beijing in the fall of 1999 when he was 19 years old. He enrolled in the Beijing Education Institute and trained at the well respected Shi Cha Hai Sports School.

Later he enrolled in the Beijing Sports University to further his martial arts training. After he finished school he tell us he worked a number of extremely pointless and boring desk jobs in various international corporations based in Beijing. But one dayMorgan woke up and decided to quit his job and use his martial arts passion to make a living.

He started modeling, then stunt work and eventually into acting and The Forbidden Kingdom alongside Jackie Chan and Jet Li is his big break and we wish him all the best.

Check out Morgan’s exclusive interview about his career and working on The Forbidden Kingdom in the next issue of Screen Power!