Summary
- The Fall Guy
, starring Ryan Gosling, broke action stunt records with a thrilling vehicle chase scene on a beach. - The stunt team, including Logan Holladay, Chris O’Hare, and Ben Jenkin, spoke to us about creating exciting but safe stunts for the action-comedy film.
- The three expert stunt performers discussed Ryan Gosling’s willingness to do stunts and how
The Fall Guy
sets a new benchmark for action movies.
The Fall Guy is receiving glowing reviews and will surely win the box office this opening weekend. If you haven’t seen the countless trailers or marketing campaign materials across TV and the world wide interweb, maybe you’ve heard already that three-time Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling plays the lead character, a stuntman named Colt Seavers. In his first post-Ken performance, Gosling’s character gets all tangled up in a dangerous plot that threatens his livelihood and those around him, including old flame Jody (Emily Blunt), who happens to be the director of the movie he’s now enlisted to work on.
Talk about meta, as Gosling is playing a stuntman (for the third time, after Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines), and has his own stunt team behind the scenes, of course, to make The Fall Guy a thrill ride from start to finish. Gosling himself has said that stunts deserve an Oscar, and we recently caught up with some of the amazing teammates behind those incredible sequences you’ll see on the big screen this weekend.
Chris O’Hara (stunt coordinator and second unit director), Logan Holladay (Gosling’s driving stunt double), and Ben Jenkin (another stunt double of Gosling’s) sat down with us on the Universal lot to share more about what it was like pulling off an epic action-comedy that will certainly go down in the books as inspiration for future stunt teams.
Breaking a Guinness World Record
The Fall Guy
4/5
- Release Date
- May 3, 2024
- Runtime
- 1hr 54min
- Studio
- 87North, Arcana, Entertainment 360
No spoilers in this article, but watch out for an incredible vehicle chase sequence on a beach in The Fall Guy that ended up breaking a Guinness World Record for most cannon rolls in a feature film. “It’s a strange thing because it was written in the script as ‘breaking a world record,’ but I think you can’t go into doing stunts like that with that intention. We’re not going for the glory,” O’Hara told MovieWeb, adding:
“So when we went through this process, the world record that was in place at the time was seven rolls on a movie. And that was downhill. So before doing any testing and looking at things, knowing that they used gravity on their side, and our location is going to be dead flat, I’m like, ‘
I don’t know if we can achieve this
.'”
“And soft sand,” Holladay added, noting the tricky terrain on which the stunt was going to be performed. Funnily enough, that’s a direct quote by Gosling’s Colt character in the film, as Colt examines the beach before stepping into his stunt vehicle (“Soft sand…” Gosling says discouragingly).
“The first cannon roll on a film was on McQ, a John Wayne film,” O’Hara continued regarding the history of their specific vehicle stunt. “And so I was like, ‘Okay, well, if we don’t break a world record, at least we can pay homage to the first kind of roll in the stunt business, in the film industry.’ And so, as we went through all of our testing and stuff, we realized that we did have something that was possible, and we weren’t being reckless or anything like that.” He explained:
“It was very calculated. Engineering specs were put in, and things were really, really thought out. And then when we achieved it, I like to call it ‘lightning in a bottle,’ because everything, every department, everything that could happen was a matter of inches, and pressure, and speed, and
all these factors lined up and created lightning in a bottle to break the world record that Logan did
.”
The Fall Guy Review: A Spectacular Start to the Summer Movie Season With Comedy, Action, and Romance
Stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) flies to Australia to find a missing star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and woo his ex-girlfriend (Emily Blunt).
Logan Holladay on Making ‘The Best Possible Stunt’
“We didn’t go into this trying to get any awards,” Holladay continued off O’Hara. “We just went into this thing trying to do the best at what we do and try to make the best possible stunt in this scenario. And you’ve got to collaborate with special effects and every other department, and all the people that are out there, locations and everybody, to make this actually work. And so our mindset the whole time was just, ‘Let’s make the best movie possible for David.'” Holladay continued:
And also, this movie’s about stunt performers, so we tried to do our best to shed the best light on stunt performers and just make something really cool. And then afterward, when all this stuff started happening with awards and everything, then that was just kind of icing on the cake.
10 Best Movie Stunts of the 2010s (And Who Performed Them)
Stunts have become one of the primordial reasons to see action movies at the theater. Here are 10 of the most amazing stunts from the 2010s.
Ben Jenkin Says Ryan Gosling Was Game to Do Stunts (But Not Get Hit by a Car)
Knowing that stunt doubles like Jenkin worked closely with Gosling on set, an actor who has played his fair share of action-hero characters on the big screen, we were curious what the dynamic was like in letting Gosling perform certain things versus stepping aside for the Fall Guy stunt professionals. “He was so game to do lots of things,” Jenkin told us. “The first time I met him, I said to him, ‘Is there anything that makes you uncomfortable, or you don’t want to do?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m not too fond of heights.’ And the opening scene of the movie is dropping him 150 feet. And he did it!” He added:
“And he was so game to do to it, get his hands dirty and do the stunts. But there were also times where he was like, ‘I don’t want to get hit by a car. That should be the stunt guy.’ So there’s a time and a place for everything. He was great. And we try to really do the biggest, coolest, most exciting stunts. And that’s a team effort…. I mean, there were five stunt people to make one Colt Seavers, one
Fall Guy
.”
The Evolution of Stunts from The Matrix and Bourne to The Fall Guy
The impressive stunt team behind The Fall Guy have a rich history of working on other acclaimed Hollywood projects, so one has to wonder which are some of their favorites. “I was fortunate to work on The Matrix,” said O’Hara. “So every meeting you went to [afterward was like], ‘We want The Matrix!’ And so that was awesome to be part of. And then I was part of the Bourne series… so everybody wanted the fighting style of The Bourne Supremacy, and that changed the way people made films.” O’Hara continued:
And I think that being part of
The Fall Guy
and doing all of this stuff, practically, and in a safe manner, I think is another one of those benchmarks that people are going to want to try and copy in the future.
Jenkin continued off O’Hara in noting how groundbreaking their new movie will become for future stunt teams in the biz:
“We do the biggest, coolest, craziest stunt gags you can imagine.
I haven’t done anything as cool and as crazy and as complex. And I’ve never been so scared doing stunts
. We just we went big. We kept it safe, but we went big.”
From Universal Pictures, The Fall Guy hits theaters May 3, 2024.
