Tony Jaa learns Monk style, quits movie biz

If you were looking forward to a lot more bone-shattering action from acrobatic Thai cyclone Tony Jaa, you’re out of luck… at least for a while.

The pachyderm-loving martial actor and star of the ONG-BAK movies has reportedly left the movie business behind for a life of peace and non-facebreaking. According to Twitch, Jaa “rode an elephant to a Buddhist temple in Surin, Thailand, where he shaved his head, took vows, and was officially ordained as a Buddhist monk.”

This isn’t the first time Jaa (aka Phanom Yeerum) put his fists in his pockets and wandered off — he disappeared during the middle of production on ONG-BAK 2, which he also directed.

Twitch speculates that Jaa, once heralded as “the next Bruce Lee”, had trouble dealing with his initial success and the pressures (some self-inflicted) that followed. His contract obligations to production house Sahamongkol seemed to involve mafia-style coercion and inevitably led to ONG-BAK 3, a recent box office flop in its home country.

So if you were putting your hopes in seeing Jaa make it stateside and take Hollywood by storm, you’d better pack up your powers of persuasion and head into the jungle after him.