The Truth About Steven Seagal’s Martial Arts Abilities

Hollywood has always had its eccentrics, but few stars are quite as strange as ’90s action icon Steven Seagal. His off-the-wall antics make even Nicolas Cage look boring. Seagal claims, for instance, that he’s still a martial arts master at the age of 69. And while he definitely kicked butt back in the day, a lot of people in Tinseltown think he may be inflating his abilities just a bit. So, what’s the truth?

You probably haven’t seen Seagal beat up a bad guy for a while. That’s because he hasn’t had a movie in theaters in almost two decades. But he still works! The problem is that he’s been stuck in the direct-to-video loop for so long that you won’t have heard of any of his latest projects. Sniper: Special Ops, anyone? Despite this, though, he’s never been more confident about his martial arts abilities. Some might even say he’s too confident...

And like all of us, Seagal’s aging. Now, he’s almost in his seventies. Physically, too, he’s a far cry from his heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But he could still be a martial arts master, right? Well, a woman who once met the star has something to say about that.

In 2017 Cassie Lane described some of Seagal’s most outlandish claims. Apparently, when she went for dinner with the star, he talked about himself non-stop. He said that he was a clairvoyant and a born healer. Oh, and that he had awesome martial arts skills even when he was young. In a piece for The Guardian, Lane said of Seagal, “He genuinely believed that he was blessed by the divine, and we mere mortals didn’t even warrant an afterthought.” So, perhaps we should take what Seagal says with a grain of salt?

Or maybe folks have been unfair to Seagal because of his reputation. He’s said to be notoriously difficult on set, and apparently most of mainstream Hollywood hates his guts. Even Charlize Theron took a shot at Seagal when she appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show in 2020.