If the Beatles and the Rolling Stones spawned their own dueling fan bases, connoisseurs of late 1980s and early ’90s action flicks often have their own disagreements about the merits and appeal of Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. While the former generally smashed heads and cracked skulls with the disposition of a sullen ox, the latter had a more compact frame, and a kind of balletic karate skill set to match a slightly more engaging personality. Known as “The Muscles From Brussels,” the Belgian-born Van Damme would put his stamp on the action genre with a string of increasingly profitable hits like Death Warrant, Double Impact, Universal Soldier and Timecop, the latter two of which were $100 worldwide smashes.

Changing tastes and struggles with drug addiction would combine to derail the genre actor, but Van Damme turned heads with 2008’s JCVD, in which he played a sad-sack version of himself, and he’s been acting again (and even directing) with regularity. In his new movie, Assassination Games, Van Damme portrays a contract killer who reluctantly teams up with a man (Scott Adkins) driven by vengeance after his most recent hit goes sideways. I had a chance to recently submit some questions by email to Van Damme, about Assassination Games, the arc of his career, the upcoming sequel to The Expendables and more. The intriguing answers, inclusive of his Facebook updates and love of dogs, are available over at ShockYa.

Don Cheadle first garnered a lot of mainstream attention with his performance opposite Denzel Washington in Devil In a Blue Dress, for which he was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association‘s Best Supporting Actor prize. Since then, of course, he’s appeared in a wide variety of mainstream and independent films, earning a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for the searing Hotel Rwanda, and further burnishing both his sociopolitical and off-camera professional credentials as one of the producers of the Oscar-winning Crash, which he was instrumental in helping get made. Heck, he was even nominated for a Grammy Award in 2004, for his narration/dramatization of the Walter Mosley novel Fear Itself.

In his new film, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Cheadle plays a FBI agent, Wendell Everett, who arrives in rural Ireland to head up a large international drug trafficking investigation, and is then forced to rely on an eccentric small town cop, Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), with a confrontational and crass personality. I had a chance to chat one-on-one with Cheadle recently, about working up a multi-layered accent for the film, the subversive racial humor coursing through this most curious and entertaining little dramedy, and his work on a long-gestating movie about Miles Davis, which will hopefully begin shooting in several months. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.