The original Street Fighter arcade game debuted in 1987, but the version that revolutionized the genre arrived four years later. Street Fighter II, released in 1991, finds two fighters, Ryu and Ken, competing in a tournament against the fiercest competitors in the world, and it went on to be hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. The franchise movie rights reverted to Legendary Pictures in 2023, and the studio’s aim was to bring a live-action Street Fighter to theaters, with the initial cast announcement dropping two years later.

It’s one of the more intriguing ensemble casts for a live-action video game adaptation in recent memory; two multi-time WWE world champions, comedians, rappers, country singers, and others flesh out a cast that went to painstaking lengths to bring their characters to life. It worked so well that Cody Rhodes now has a Guille haircut popcorn bucket.

Ahead of the theatrical release of Street Fighter, which hits IMAX theaters on October 16, 2026, Complex spoke with stars Andrew Koji, Noah Centineo, Callina Liang, and 50 Cent about joining the project, training, and the camaraderie they shared in Australia while cameras were rolling. (If you were at ComplexCon, you definitely saw Koji, Centineo, and Liang near the Street Fighter car installation.)

50 Cent (Balrog): I knew Street Fighter. You couldn’t really miss it. It was part of the culture, the arcades, the characters, the competition, everybody knew what it was. What I didn’t realize until I got involved with the film was how deep the world really is and how much these characters mean to the fans. Once I started looking closer at Balrog, I understood why they came to me with him. He made sense.

Callina Liang (Chun-Li): I was actually in Austin at the time with my friend randomly. We were like, "Let's go to Austin, Texas. Never been to Texas before." I was just there holidaying randomly. Literally, I think two hours after I land[ed], I got a call from my team, and they were like, "Hey, so I don't know if you've ever heard of Street Fighter, but they're making a live-action movie." And I was like, "Have I heard of the game? I grew up playing it. What about it?" They're like, "Oh, do you know this character Chun-Li?" At this point, I'm shaking….

Andrew Koji (Ryu): I started talking to Cale probably about a year before we started, before even the contracts, any of that stuff. He just mentioned it briefly. I think the RackaRacka brothers were still attached, but they were figuring that out.

I remember, I sat down with my friend who was a Street Fighter fan. "What do you think about this, this, this, and that?" He was a diehard fan; he said, “I think this is the right way. They seem to have nailed the tone.” And I was like, "OK, that's a good sign.” And then they said they were finding their Ken.

Noah Centineo (Ken): I actually didn't know anything about the development process [or] where Street Fighter was and that Legendary wanted to adapt it into a live-action film.

I went to the theater, and I watched Minecraft, and I was surrounded by a myriad of ages—kids in middle school, high school, college, my age, older—and everybody was having a hell of a time watching this movie. I had a hell of a time watching the movie. I didn't even play Minecraft.

I thought, "Who's making this? I want to be in business with the company making this movie,” and that company's Legendary. So I called my team, and I said, "Hey, I want to meet with Legendary. I want to go in and just have a general meeting." And I did. I met with Mary Parent and Cale Boyter and a bunch of the other executives there, and at the end of the meeting, Cale just really passively was like, "Have you ever heard of Street Fighter?" I was like, "Yeah, actually, I grew up playing the game. My family were the ones that introduced me to the Street Fighter II cabinet game. Eight-years-old, they had one at their house. I love the game.” And he said, "All right, cool. Anyway, we're thinking about maybe doing it." Little did I know that Andrew had been talking to him for a year.

Koji: I wasn't a huge Street Fighter guy, because I wasn't very good at it. I was a button-basher, button-masher, however you want to call it, but I could do the Hadokens and the certain moves. I got my ass beat a lot.

Liang: I think it was Street Fighter II, the arcade game. There was a really old, beaten-up arcade game near where I was living in China. I was in Beijing at the time, and my grandma would just bring me there every time after [my] piano lesson if I did a good job that day. If I didn't do a good job, I was not allowed to go.

I think there was something therapeutic about learning the moves, beating someone up. I don't know if I have anger issues. Maybe I do. Maybe that's why this has all worked out for me. But yeah, that's kind of where my love for fighting games actually started. It was from Street Fighter.

Centineo: So for six weeks, man, what was really, really wonderful about this process was—

Koji: You started working before [those] six weeks. You were training.

Centineo: I had six weeks of weightlifting before we all got to Australia together. And then maybe two, at the end of those weeks, [were] Shotokan, karate, kickboxing, Muay Thai, different fighting styles.

Koji, Callina, and myself spent all day, every day together; we'd wake up for breakfast together. Sorry, we actually wouldn't usually eat. We would wake up and go to training for two hours, then we'd get breakfast for about an hour. Then we would do rehearsals for a few hours. Then we would have lunch. Then we would train again for two more hours. Then we would go to—

Koji: Fittings.

Centineo: Fittings, and then we'd go recovery, sonic, cold plunge, stretching, whatever it was. And then script work. And then we went to dinner, which was also character development; we'd just talk about the movie. And then we would walk home from dinner, you know what I mean? So by the time we went to sleep, we had spent all day together and we did, all day, every day, for six weeks. So there was a real transformation and an amalgamation that took place where we became brothers. We became very close. Obviously, Chun-Li has a different relationship to Ken and Ryu, so our real relationship in real life doesn't really translate onto screen as much in this film.

Koji: I had to start adapting my style. I knew with my experience, I could do choreography quite easily and figure out that aspect of it. It was just adjusting styles and sharpening some striking stuff up.

Then Jon Valera and his team helped build a fighting style specifically around the character. Balrog isn’t trying to be pretty. He’s powerful. He wants to overwhelm you. He’s built like a tank and hits like a truck. That’s where I found him.

Once we were filming, I’d start the morning with boxing, then go to set for additional training. From there, I’d get a massage, do cryotherapy, and go straight into weight training. I was averaging about three hours of training a day—an hour and a half of boxing and another hour and a half in the gym. As we got closer to the end of filming, I added evening fast-interval training as well.

The goal wasn’t just to get in shape. I needed to physically become Balrog. I went from 238 pounds to 200 pounds preparing for the role, and I hit 200 right as the cameras started rolling.

I had to buy myself so many random things to help with recovering quicker. I spent I think $400 on these Normatec hip compression things; they were the compression boots. I use them a lot. My gym has those, but they didn't have the hip thing. And because with kicking, it's so much hip stuff, so my hips were always in pain. I got dry needling done every single day.

Obviously I was in the sauna and doing the cold plunge a lot, but eating enough definitely helped me recover. I think after a while, my body was just used to being in a constant state of light soreness. I was very lucky that no injury or anything like that happened.

But yeah, it's no surprise that my legs grew so much, because they were all that I was working on, and with the amount I was eating, I think it was just going there. [Ed Note: Liang’s hard work—and the 12 eggs she ate a day—paid off, adding two-and-a-half inches to each thigh.]

50 Cent: Everybody wants to talk about the hair. The look is part of Balrog. Fans know exactly what he’s supposed to look like, so when you take on a character like this, you have to embrace it. Hair, wardrobe, the physicality—all of it has to come together so when people see me, they see Balrog. I definitely had moments where I looked in the mirror and said, “OK, we’re really doing this.” But once everything was on, it helped put me into the character.

Liang: I grew up playing the game and I looked up to Chun-Li as a little girl. It's getting better, but you don't really see a lot of Asian faces, especially in a superhero/action movie type of way. It makes me emotional thinking about, maybe a little girl is going to look up to Chun-Li thinking, yeah, she can be strong, too. And on top of that, her being Chinese and embracing the fact that she is. I speak Mandarin in the movie as well. There's a couple of lines in there.

The other thing I'm really excited about is for girls to look up to a character like that and to want to be strong, and to know that there is a place for us in Hollywood as well. I want to keep fighting for that representation. It's gotten better, but I think we have still a long way to go. I just want to keep seeing more Asian faces in big projects like these.

Koji: I think with Ryu, just like any job as an actor, you take it seriously—you read the books, you do source-material work, you do your backstory research work. So I did all that. And then [there] was the voice. It was always dubbed, even in the video games. It's like he has a strong American accent, and that never made sense to me because he grew up in the countryside in Japan. He’s a stoic martial artist, and there's a lot of pitfalls that you could go into because if you just play that note, where's the humanity? Where's the vulnerability? Where's the quirkiness? I looked up to Ryu. He’s cool. He's a symbol of strength. I was like, I can portray him in a way that another kid might be able to look at— a younger kid— [and say] there's someone that I can aspire to.

Liang: I think I'm just excited for people to see this human side of her. I feel like everybody knows her as the video-game character, [or as] an anime character. But what I really tried to humanize her. What does it feel like to be her in the world that she's living in, carrying all the problems she's carrying and being alone? She doesn't really have many friends, and seeing her go through the human experience, I think that's fresh.

Liang: Me, Noah, and Andrew especially got very close, because we were the first ones out there and we spent a month together.We had a group chat. It got to a point where we were sharing our locations. Me and Noah would be in the sauna; we went to this one place in Sydney, and then Andrew would just pop up out of nowhere. It was a routine. Train, eat, sauna, eat every single day.

Centineo: We had a Street Fighter II cabinet on set at all times, so we could all go and play whenever we wanted, and [Andrew] Schulz [Dan Hibiki] wiped the floor with everybody.

Liang: I think me and Orville [Peck, who plays Vega], we got along so well; we clicked instantly. He became genuinely one of my best friends on set. I always say he's the reason I got through it, because there's so much masculine energy.

We always just became a huge family. Every single weekend something was going on. Whenever we had free time, it was like, "Hey, want to do this? Want to do that?"

Centineo: Cody Rhodes [Guille] got us a yacht to go around the harbor.

Liang: 50 Cent rented out Luna Park for all of us.

50 Cent: They took the entire cast out on a yacht while we were filming in Australia; it was so cool, but then the very next weekend, I said, “oh shit, I need to do something,” so I shut down the amusement park in Australia and invited the entire cast and crew to join me for a day of fun. We had the best time.

Liang: Roman Reigns [Akuma] rented out a restaurant. I rented out nothing. I just showed up.

50 Cent: We had a good time. What was different about this one is everybody had to put the work in before you even got in front of the camera. We were training, rehearsing, learning the choreography, so you build chemistry through that process. And everybody came from different worlds, which made it interesting.

Liang: I still can't keep it together around 50 Cent. Everybody knows that. I remember when I knew he was cast, but I was like, "Right, I'm not going to meet him for a while." And then the days were coming, and I was talking to Noah and Koji. "Guys, I'm really nervous. Should I ask for a picture with him?" And then Noah was like, "Dude, stop geeking out. You're being such a nerd." And I was like, "Oh shit. Yeah, I got to be cool. I got to act cool." But then I gave up on it.

Liang: 50 Cent won me this dinosaur toy in Luna Park. It's this big, and I shipped it back to Canada. It's still in my bedroom. I will keep that [until] the day I die.

Koji: Roman Reigns is a huge [persona in] WWE. I met Joe [Anoa’i, Reigns’ real name], and I worked with Joe, and I met a passionate, humble, hardworking, absolutely sweet-natured, good human being. And it was a tough fight. It was a tough fight to film. And I think we had a lot of expectations. Obviously, there's a huge, for the fans, it's Ryu versus Akuma. And he felt that.

Centineo: It's an overwhelming responsibility to take a game that is so beloved and so iconic as Street Fighter and adapt it properly for the big screen in a way that is respectful of the fans and meets the expectations of those that love the game. Everyone felt that weight, but no one came at it from a place of insecurity. Everyone came at it from a place of love and excitement and support for one another.

50 Cent: Obviously the fights were fun, because Balrog is built for that. When he shows up, you know somebody is probably about to have a problem. But what I like is that the movie has personality outside of the fighting, too. They really leaned into that early-’90s Street Fighter energy: the attitude, the humor, the style, these larger-than-life characters. So Balrog gets to exist as a character and not just somebody who comes in and throws punches.

Koji: We get to see Ryu and Ken in a way that's never been done before on screen, and have their story told, and have their buddy-buddy thing. It's everything that Ryu and Ken fans, I believe, would hope for.

Centineo: There are specific scenes that we had a hell of a time making. That rain fight, for me, was wonderful. It's a big fight between the two of us, and seeing that fully finished was raw, was so sick. [To Koji] Was it three or four days? Do you remember? Three or four nights?

Koji: Four. It was four nights just in the rain.

Centineo: The rain. In the cold, and we were just going at it.

Koji: Normally in films, if you're doing a rain scene, normally you've got a costume on, right? And then beneath that, you can wear a wetsuit. These guys don't wear many clothes, right? They got a gi and they don't even have a proper gi with sleeves.

Centineo: We've ripped them all.

Liang: I think I was so nervous going into it. Watching yourself on screen for the first time in any project is always a weird experience. But I think for this, because I was so extra emotionally attached in a way, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I really hope I did her justice. I really hope I did a good job."

Now, I think back and I'm like, "I actually can't even remember much of the specifics. I got to watch it for a second time." It was a blast watching it. I remember being entertained. I remember it finishing and I was like, "Whoa, it's already over. What do you mean?" It just all flew by. But yeah, everyone else looked amazing [laughs].

Rayna [Vallandingham, who plays Juli] was sitting next to me, and every time I saw her face, I was like, "Yo, yo, it looks so cool." I see myself and I'm like, "Who's that?” Man, it made me feel more immersed into the movie. And I think it's all the fight sequences, all the Easter eggs. And also just the way it was designed: the graphics, the lighting, the colors—it's so retro and campy and fun. It's not serious, but then it gets serious, and then it reminds you it's a video game again. I think Kitao found the perfect balance of embracing the world of Street Fighter without making fun of it and creating this very unique and special movie going experience.

50 Cent: Everyone really showed up for this movie. The entire cast came ready to work, and everybody delivers across the board. There are some incredible performances, and I’m excited for people to finally see what we made.

Centineo: After watching the film, there was a security guard in the theater that was tasked to destroy the digital key after we finished watching it, so no one could reprint it and put it out.

We finished the movie. I go into the lobby; the security guard kills the key. I'm out there talking to people, and next thing I know, I get tackled against the door, and it's the security guard. And he's a big dude, and he's acting like a five-year-old because he's so excited and so happy in the coolest way ever, man. He was amped because he got to watch the movie, and then it was revealed: he was a huge fan of the game, loved playing it. It was a part of his life, and that reaction told me everything that I really wanted to hear about it.

Street Fighter hits theaters on October 16, 2026.