Dan Chupong
Dan Chupong is an actor, born 1981.
Chupong Changprung, billed internationally as Dan Chupong, came up the hard way Thai action cinema used to demand. He worked on the stunt team of the choreographer Panna Rittikrai, and his first film credit is Bodyguard 4 in Ong-Bak. Nobody remembers Bodyguard 4. Everybody who saw that film in 2003 remembers what it did to the market, and he was inside it.
He got his own films fast. Born to Fight in 2004 gave him a lead, and Dynamite Warrior in 2006 gave him the strangest role of his career, a rocket-riding cattle thief in a period Thai action fantasy with no real equivalent anywhere else. Both films sell the same proposition: a trained stunt performer doing things on camera in long takes, in a tradition that made a point of not hiding the work. Queen of Langkasuka and Somtum followed in 2008.
Then the industry moved on. He returned to the Ong Bak films as the villain Crow Ghost, uncredited in the second and front and centre in the third, and after that the work thinned into smaller Thai action pictures, a comedy in Oversize Cops, and an international payday as Bai in Expend4bles. He studied physical education at Srinakarinwirot before any of it, which explains more about the career than most actor biographies do. He is still working: The Cursed Mask in 2025 and a 2026 film that returns him to the character name Deaw, where he started.
Movies (10)
Where to start with Dan Chupong
Everything worth knowing about him is in Born to Fight, a small-town action picture staged as one continuous escalation of stunt work, with the camera held long enough that you can see nobody is being protected. Watch that before anything else.
Dynamite Warrior comes second, mostly because there is no other film like it: a period Thai fantasy in which the hero rides a rocket. Then take Ong-Bak to see where he entered the frame as a bodyguard with a number instead of a name, and Ong Bak 3 for his turn as the villain Crow Ghost, which is a better performance than the film around it.
Expend4bles is the international footnote, Vengeance of an Assassin the leaner late-period vehicle, and My Dearest Assassin the 2026 return.