Roll with the punches
Ryan Gosling’s The Fall Guy isa love letter to stunt performers.
AFTER serving “Kenergy” with Barbie, actor Ryan Gosling turns the spotlight on the movie-makers whose job is to shine on screen while remaining invisible in The Fall Guy.
The film is inspired by the popular 1980s TV series of the same name and stars Gosling as Colt Seavers, a top Hollywood stuntman down on his luck after an on-set accident.
An ambitious film producer (Hannah Waddingham) manages to pull Colt out of his self-imposed post-injury isolation in order to rescue the directorial debut of the love of his life, Jody (Emily Blunt), following the disappearance of the film’s leading man, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylorjohnson).
Life starts imitating his art as Colt tries to track down the vanished superstar and lands in the middle of a criminal plot. The stuntman has to put on his best performance both on and off the screen to save Jody’s movie – and himself.
“I’ve benefited from the work of stunt people my whole career. They come in and they take the hits for you and then get none of the credit. That ends here. Hopefully the whole conversation is different after this film,” Gosling said as he attended the movie’s premiere in London recently.
“It’s completely a love letter to stunt performers and the magic of what they create in movies. It’s a love letter to crews and making films,” added Blunt.
The Fall Guy, which was shot in Sydney, Australia, is directed by David Leitch, a former stunt double to stars including Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, and director of Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde.
Many of its daring action scenes were shot with real in-camera stunts and during filming Gosling’s stunt double Logan Holladay set a Guinness World Record for the most cannon rolls in a car.
The classic stunt sees an apparatus fitted beneath a car that propels it into a series of rolls at a designated speed. Holladay’s 8.5 rolls broke Adam Kirley’s 2006 record of seven in Casino Royale.
“It was a mandate to do some oldschool classic stunts and blow them out as big as possible,” said Leitch.
“The record was written in the script. We wrote it in the script to throw down the gauntlet and challenge the stunt team to come with it, and I think they did,” said Leitch, 48.
Stunt coordinator Chris O’hara was given a “stunt designer” credit on the project in what the creators said was an industry first and an acknowledgement of the multifaceted nature of his job.
“Hopefully it sheds light to the Academy, that maybe someday we might be able to be up for an Academy Award, just like all of our other department heads in the business,” said O’hara.
“This industry’s backbone is the action movie. It’s the movie that travels the most internationally. It’s time that they’re celebrated for what they contribute,” added actor Winston Duke.