Credit: Press Service of the President of Russia
Tue 26 May 2026 18:15, UK
For many valid reasons, a lot of people in Hollywood hate Steven Seagal. Unsurprisingly, there were also a few names in the industry who were on his shit-list, too, with a 1980s movie icon taking the top spot.
This being Steven Seagal, who’s always come across as a man who actively enjoys the smell of his own farts, it was perfectly on-brand that he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that his single biggest criticism of his de facto arch-nemesis was an area in which they were markedly better than him.
However, and again, because this is Steven Seagal, he either couldn’t comprehend that he was inferior in every conventional and measurable metric, or he was so high on his own supply that he didn’t care. Based on how high an opinion he’s always had of himself, we’d feel pretty confident saying that it’s the latter.
In an era where anyone even mildly proficient in hand-to-hand combat, either real or simulated, was being handed top billing in B-tier action flicks, Seagal rose up the ranks to enjoy a brief spell as one of the genre’s most prominent ass-kickers, until his rampaging ego and general dickishness took over.
There are at least a dozen actors, some of whom he never even worked with, who can’t fucking stand him, and he was so unpopular in other circles that Bob Wall corralled together 11 other martial artists, nicknamed them ‘The Dirty Dozen’, and gave the group one mandate: to beat Seagal to death.
Wall was a friend of The Way of the Dragon co-stars Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, who Seagal had a habit of badmouthing in the press, operating under the impression that he was the greatest martial artist to ever grace the silver screen. It’s nonsense, yes, but he believed it, and when Norris began to gain traction as an above-the-title star in the mid-1980s, the ponytailed Aikido master was furious.
“I can’t stand his movies,” Seagal said. “I can’t watch them. Just because he’s a movie star doesn’t mean he’s a great martial artist.” Pot, meet kettle. You could say the exact same thing about him, especially when he barely threw a punch in the latter years of his career when it was much easier to have a double do it instead, but his criticism doesn’t hold so much as a drop of water.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Norris, who admittedly was awful as a dramatist and conveyor of human emotion, was nonetheless a black belt in five different disciplines, won the All-American Karate Championship three years in a row, claimed the National Karate Championship in 1966, and spent six undefeated years as the World Professional Middleweight Karate Champion, so as bad an actor as he was, he was a proven martial artist.
Seagal, meanwhile, has won precisely zero championships in any form of martial arts and once shit himself when he was placed in a chokehold by Gene LeBell, which doesn’t really compare. If the two ’80s favourites ever did have a scrap, then it stands to reason that Norris would wipe the floor with him.
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