LOS ANGELES—Most of us missed meeting the Beatles or Elvis by a few decades, but there’s a rare and unmistakable excitement when Asian megastar Jay Chou takes his seat at an in-studio news conference for The Green Hornet. Even flanked by Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Seth Rogen, and a personal translator who’s either Miss Taiwan or the world’s hottest temp, Chou is unavoidably the centre of attention. And he hardly says a word.

“We were worried about the lack of English,” producer Neal Moritz says of the musician-actor, who makes his Hollywood film debut in the demented action-comedy as Kato, the infinitely more competent “sidekick” to Seth Rogen’s goofy masked crime fighter, Britt Reid. “But it turned out, I think, to be a very endearing quality for Kato.”

Considering he brought us The Fast and the Furious and xXx, Moritz displays an unexpected gift for understatement. Even delivering his lines phonetically, Chou is more than endearing in the role; he’s utterly magnetic, and he steals the film. Just as Kato catapulted Bruce Lee to stardom in the 1966 TV version, The Green Hornet should get Chou’s career rolling in the hemisphere he hasn’t totally conquered yet.

His cohorts appear to be as star-struck as the rest of us. Director Michel Gondry describes the Taiwanese singer descending to the stage “like an angel” at an L.A. concert the previous night. He also applauds him for not wanting “to do a spin on Bruce Lee”, while costar Diaz gushes about his “ability as a dancer, and the way he learned choreography for the fights”.

“And Jay is an amazing magician,” she continues. “Like, phenomenal. He entertained us a lot with his magic, with cards and sleight of hand.”¦It’s something that I think adds to the grace of Kato and the mystery of Kato.”

Rogen, meanwhile, was amazed to find his costar somehow navigating ably around a completely foreign language. “He started improvising,” he says, “and we were, like, ”˜Oh, man, what the hell?’ It took me 15 years to be able to do that.”

As for the man himself, Chou’s tentative English keeps him quiet for the most part, making him seem even more enigmatic and ineffably cool than he already is. He describes being “a little bit nervous” during a Skype audition for Green Hornet in a tongue he’d never spoken before. On the subject of Black Beauty—the tricked-out ’60s Chrysler Imperial wisely held over from the vintage TV series—Chou reckons (correctly) that it makes “James Bond’s cars look sissy”. And he says the best part of his role as the ass-kicking, cappuccino-making, stunt-driving, and sartorially perfect brains behind the Green Hornet was “shooting bad guys”. Because, he explains, “Everybody wants to be a hero.”

Finally, when Chou is asked about his on-screen dustups, he smirks. “I didn’t get hurt in the fight scenes,” he says, “because I’m Kato.”

See that? He’s even got charming smart-ass down to the fewest words possible.