Chuck Norris Played Too Good a Bad Guy to Stay One

Chuck Norris could have been a meme from the moment, in 1972, that he stepped into the Roman Colosseum to face down Bruce Lee. It would take more than 30 years before Norris would become the internet’s favorite avatar of manly hyperbole, the subject of silly aphorisms—such as “Chuck Norris sleeps with the lights on because the dark is afraid of him”—that spoke to his tough persona. He was larger than life from the start but had to turn bite-size to become truly famous.

The future VHS king, who died on Thursday at 86, might have been remembered merely as one of popular culture’s great henchmen. After he spent his earliest years in rural Oklahoma, his family moved to Torrance, California. He immersed himself in martial arts while stationed as an airman in South Korea. He returned to Southern California in 1962, and fought in tournaments and opened a small chain of karate schools that attracted celebrity clients. A producer who saw him fight offered him a bit part in the 1968 Dean Martin vehicle The Wrecking Crew, earning Norris his SAG card. Another up-and-comer working on that production was Bruce Lee.

Norris is in that film for a blink, but he banished any doubts about his screen magnetism a few years later in Lee’s The Way of the Dragon. Norris has just one dubbed line, and he doesn’t speak at all during the epic, and epically funny, showdown in the Colosseum. Norris had been Steve McQueen’s fighting instructor. In return, the actor advised Norris that on-screen, quietude equals power.

What mattered more than his terseness was that Norris was allowed to land a few meaningful blows against the usually untouchable Lee, who stars as Tang Lung, a fighter summoned to defend a restaurant owner menaced by a crime boss. Norris is Colt, “America’s best,” called in by the bad guys to kill Tang after the latter makes short work of their regular leg-breakers.

[Read: What we can learn from Bruce Lee’s fight scenes]

The film’s finale begins with Norris gazing impassively at his enemy while he slowly rotates his wrist from a thumbs-up gesture to a thumbs-down. Once the combatants are face to face, they gingerly strip to the waist while holding eye contact. It’s almost tender—at least until they retire to their corners for a brief but unhurried warm-up. Lee wiggles his deltoids until his shoulder blades look like they’ll pop though the skin of his back; Norris shakes out his strawberry-blond hair like he’s in a shampoo ad.

All of it is ripe for meme-ing. When Lee breaks Norris’s neck nine minutes later, he pauses to honor his slain adversary, his triumph witnessed only by a noisy kitten. Watching it now, it feels like a forecast that Norris would live on in the not-yet-extant medium that would turn cat videos into a thing.

Lee might have foreseen the appeal of Norris’s peculiar blend of Okie familiarity and hyperbolic badassery before Norris did. They were both world-class physical specimens, but the chiseled and regal Lee looked and moved like a star. Norris, by contrast, could pass for a regular guy when he wanted to, and once he began starring in his own films, his American ordinariness, right up until the moment it was time to take out the trash, was key to his appeal. He was the movie-star equivalent of Johnny Cash or Tom Petty: someone who let you feel like you could do what he did, even though you almost certainly could not.  

Norris wanted to be a screen hero, and he was willing to start at the bottom to do it. He got his first starring role in 1977’s Breaker! Breaker!, playing a trucker taking on the corrupt lawmen of Texas City, California. After five years of low-rent, highly profitable indies, he graduated to studio films with 1982’s Silent Rage. Though not among his most fondly regarded movies, it may have predicted his second life as a meme—that internet phenomenon dubbed “Chuck Norris Facts”—with its poster copy: Science created him. Now Chuck Norris must stop him.

The film that perfected the Norris appeal was arguably 1983’s Lone Wolf McQuade: Sporting an impressive array of Western bib shirts like the ones worn by his hero, John Wayne, he plays a Marine-veteran Texas Ranger who lives with his pet wolf. (Fact: “In Chuck Norris’s world, there are no metaphors, only meta-tens.”) He grew out the beard that became so central to his image. (Fact: “There is no chin underneath Chuck Norris’s beard. There is only another fist.”) He vanquishes the former Kung Fu star David Carradine in hand-to-hand combat. In a three-and-a-half-star review, Roger Ebert enthused that Norris had finally found his groove, positing “it could be the beginning of a series.” Norris would spend the century’s final decade playing a Texas Ranger in a series—just not a series of feature films.

The 1985 thriller Code of Silence, starring Norris as a Chicago cop who balks at a police cover-up, was the moment he might have fought his way into respectable movies. It was directed by Andrew Davis, who’d make the Best Picture–nominated megahit The Fugitive eight years later. Davis knew how to keep the alpha swagger of stars such as Norris and Steven Seagal under control. Both were at their most compelling in their Davis-directed movies.

Norris expressed gratitude for the generally favorable reception to Code of Silence, then went right back to starring in familiar, low-ambition fare. While other action heroes of his era sought the guidance of A-list filmmakers or branched out into comedy, Norris seemed content within his B-grade (and often C-grade) niche. The director with whom he collaborated most frequently? Aaron Norris, his brother. A multi-picture deal with the schlock factory the Cannon Group allowed Norris to colonize video-store shelves with jingoistic hits including Missing in Action, Invasion U.S.A., and The Delta Force. When stars such as Bruce Willis sought to escape the glamour-deficient confines of network television, Norris was already looking in the other direction.

In 1993, Norris put down roots at CBS. Most of the roughly 200 episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger have the moralizing flavor of after-school specials, albeit weirdly violent ones. The show’s longevity allowed it to go into syndication in the late ’90s, while new episodes were still being produced.

In 2004, after Walker had wrapped up as a weekly series, the then–Late Night host Conan O’Brien (or one of his writers) discovered that the show’s parent company held the syndication rights to Walker, and Late Night could air clips from it whenever the writers wanted to. They pretended to do this by pulling an oversize prop lever. These baby portions of Walker, presented without comment, were reliably hilarious. One from a 1997 episode wherein a 9-year-old Haley Joel Osment cheerfully announces “Walker told me I have AIDS” became a classic of whatever emerging genre this was.

Norris proved himself a good sport in September 2004, when, after several months of Walker excerpts as jokes, he appeared on Late Night with his own giant lever, one that cued up a funny clip of him kicking O’Brien into a conveniently placed stack of cardboard boxes after the host pulled a knife on him.

These bits preceded Chuck Norris Facts by roughly a year. They preceded Norris’s own descent from Reaganesque conservatism into birtherism and Islamophobia by not much more than that. But the advent of Norris-as-meme had the weird benefit of shielding him from the fallout of his own opinions. Thinking of Norris as the guy who “counted to infinity, twice,” or the guy who “beat the sun in a staring contest” fixed him in many imaginations as a lovable, or at least harmless, caricature of fortitude instead of a fully dimensional person who held some intolerant views. Quietude, once again, equaled power.