Flips, kicks and accidents: what it takes to become a stunt double
British “stunties” – men and women who perform stunts on film – are in high demand, as films get grittier and the UK’s studios continue to thrive. Simon Usborne reports on what the job entails
In a sheltered life based largely at a desk, I have managed to avoid any sort of scenario in which head-butting seemed like a good move. Now I’m being asked to do it with conviction, and it feels so weird that I’m struggling not to laugh. To be fair, the stakes are high. I’ve been taken hostage by captors unknown and am being frogmarched towards an uncertain fate. As a menacing man approaches, I kick him in the stomach. And so begins the “choreo” (fight choreography) that I’ve been trying to memorise. I turn to the baddie to my left and – WHAM! – toss her to the floor. Now I turn to the right and – BOSH! – I swing my head at Nikita Mitchell, a 34-year-old former dancer who was Margot Robbie’s stunt double in Barbie. But, being taller than her and lacking physical finesse, I feel like one of those fighting giraffes on David Attenborough’s Africa series.
“Cut!” Ian Pead pauses the melee to offer some head-butting advice. He knows his stuff; the wiry, 46-year-old former martial artist has worked as a stunt performer and coordinator for more than 20 years. He wants me to move my whole body into the head-butt rather than just thrashing my head. I should also angle my face towards the camera. I manage a slightly more composed head-butt before I take on more assailants. None of the blows connect, but when the camera position is right, the viewer sees no gap between fist and face. With each hit, stunties, as they call themselves, fall away, grunting and groaning with total commitment to the scene.
I have come to a studio space at the back of a theatre in Harlow, Essex, at a critical time for a profession and tradition that is as old as celluloid. As demand grows for ever more dramatic and gritty action scenes, so the pressure builds for the stunt people who put their necks on the line without, as they see it, proper recognition. Pead is here with a dozen members of the British Stunt Register (BSR), a directory of 450 coordinators and performers first issued in 1973. Members must pass rigorous tests in six disciplines, from fighting to driving, horse riding, scuba diving, swimming, rock climbing and gymnastics. And they’re in demand as Hollywood studios and TV streamers exploit Britain’s talent, tax breaks and infrastructure, including studios at Pinewood and Leavesden.
“Not long ago you’d have performers who might work a handful of times a year and do something else on the side,” says James Cox, 39, a member of the BSR committee who has doubled for Daniel Craig. “Now people join the register and they’re working the next day.” At the same time, a close-knit fraternity that has operated in the shadows is karate-kicking its way into the limelight. “Back in the day, stunt people were almost these kind of mythical figures, but now people are more intrigued about what we do,” says Bobby Holland Hanton, 39, a British stuntie and one of the most in-demand doubles in the business. The former gymnast posts frequent behind-the-scenes snippets to his social media, where he has almost 800,000 followers. (With his stacked body and square jaw, it helps that he looks more like a movie star than many movie stars.)
A week before Pead teaches me to fight, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt introduce a tribute montage to Hollywood’s “unsung heroes” at the Academy Awards. Gosling and Blunt are the stars of The Fall Guy, a big-budget love letter to the stuntie community that comes out next week. Its director, David Leitch, is a former stuntman and a producer of the John Wick films.
The Oscars moment seemed heartfelt enough, but landed as an empty gesture for some in the business, after decades of campaigning for an awards category for stunts. “I didn’t even watch it because I’m boycotting the Oscars until they give us an award,” says Eunice Huthart, 57, a leading British stunt coordinator who has doubled for Angelina Jolie. Bafta, too, has no stunt category in its film awards, despite honouring make-up and hair; a casting Oscar will be introduced in 2026. Last month, a stunt performer was nominated at the Bafta Television Awards, but for a documentary about an accident that left him paralysed on the set of Harry Potter in 2009. David Holmes, who co-produced the film, was rehearsing for his final outing as Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double when he was yanked too hard by a wire while pretending to be struck by a giant snake.
Greg Powell, the cigar-chomping, plain-speaking stunt coordinator for all the Potter films, is still haunted by the accident. He sees a cruel irony in Holmes’s nomination. “If David has to break his neck to get a Bafta, then you can poke that up your arse, because he should have got one for his work in the films,” says Powell, 69, an old-school titan in the profession. “Studios are making millions out of action movies, but I think people still don’t understand what goes into it.”
“None of the blows connect, but when the camera position is right, the viewer sees no gap between fist and face”
In Harlow, Pead is now conducting a reactions demonstration. “One of the biggest things for us is learning to die well,” he says.
Two by two, the stunties run forwards before Pead shouts “Bang!”, at which point they must die. They flop, they roll, they slam on their faces. Pead says the Band of Brothers series (2001) required so much of this kind of death that war films often still call for “Band of Brothers” reactions. “We also like to say, ‘Cut the strings,’ as if you’re a puppet,” he adds. Tom Rodgers, a fight specialist, shows me what is known as a “Motorola”, after the old folding flip phones; when he’s shot while running, his legs come forwards as he folds himself in half in the air and lands flat on his back. I feel winded just watching him. Yet performers rarely have the luxury of the foot-thick crash mats that they’re dying on today. They sometimes do the same stunts on concrete with hidden pads and back protectors. They must also often consider their resting place. “If you’re locked into continuity, you might need to be a dead body on the floor for three days,” Pead explains.
Joining the British register requires investment; it can cost around £10,000 to train for the driving test alone. But the rewards can be big; most BSR members are part of the Equity union, which sets a minimum day rate for stunt performers of £500 for TV and about £650 for film. Specialists can command much more. Doubles for major actors can earn tens of thousands of pounds a week. “You can certainly live a very affluent life, but you’ve got to think about how high the standards are, and about the risks,” Cox says.
The first audited stunts involved fees of $5 during the filming of the 1908 silent picture The Count of Monte Cristo. In one scene, an unnamed man was asked to swim out to sea and disappear underwater. When he stayed under longer than expected, the director was reportedly more concerned about his $20 wig than the performer himself. In the 1930s, Yakima Canutt, a rodeo star, worked with John Wayne to develop the first fighting techniques, many of which are still in use. Later, during the postwar craze for “swords and sandals” epics, Canutt staged the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959), a 78-horse spectacular that took a year to plan.
Greg Powell, whose father and uncle were stuntmen, started working in the 1970s, a golden era for the profession as the rise of martial arts movies and more sophisticated technology pushed boundaries. Meanwhile, the Bond movies were cementing the UK’s reputation for derring-do. “We were a different breed,” Powell says. “Even before you train as a stuntman, you’ve got to want to jump off that building, crash that car or get set on fire.”
From the early days of Hollywood, accidents have been the price of action. David Holmes was 17 when he started work on the Potter films and remains a close friend to Daniel Radcliffe. The stunt that went wrong is known as a “jerk-back”, in which harnessed performers are yanked backwards on a wire to simulate the effects of a big blow or explosion. The jerk-back left Holmes hanging like a rag doll. “I knew I’d broken my neck straight away and within a week I knew my career was over,” he says.
In 2015, Olivia Jackson, a South African stunt double based in the UK, was struck by a camera crane while she rode a motorbike at 43mph on the set of a Resident Evil film. She lay in a coma for days and lost an arm. In 2017, John Bernecker, an American, died a day after falling onto concrete while filming the Walking Dead TV series. A month after that, Joi Harris, also American, was killed in a motorbike crash on the set of Deadpool 2. Powell is characteristically phlegmatic about such dangers. “Every stunt is a risk, big or small, it’s the name of the game,” he says. But he supports the push by the profession for better safety protocols and accountability.
A few days later, I arrive at a disused RAF airfield in Rutland. Drivetac, which occupies a couple of buildings next to the old runway, is a precision driving academy that the BSR uses to train and test stunties. “Faster. Faster. Faster... Pull!” Ailís Smith, a 28-year-old rookie stunt performer, is in the passenger seat as I speed rather too conservatively towards a human-sized plastic barrel. My job is the easiest in the business – stopping on a mark. I need to slam on the brakes at 40mph and stop within three inches of the barrel. The first time I do it, I stop way short of the barrel. The second time, I send it flying halfway to Peterborough. I improve, but don’t manage the three-inch gap. “On set, you’ve got to get it right ten out of ten times,” says Lloyd Bass, 55, a grizzled stunt driver and coordinator from Kent who’s been watching us.
Next, I slalom through cones as Smith coaches me to steer way more aggressively than I would even in a dodgem. It’s the kind of driving that might be needed in a chase scene. She then teaches me how to do handbrake turns through 90 and 180 degrees (180 is way easier, it turns out) and how to drift and skid.
Car sequences are a good example of a recent drive towards greater realism in cinema, after decades in which many big-budget movies got carried away with the early promise of computergenerated imagery (CGI). “These days it’s all about trying to blend the stunt performer and the talent seamlessly,” says Bass, who has driven for dozens of stars, and wore a wig to double for Helen Mirren in the 2021 instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise (“I also had a shave that day,” he adds). Stars with genuine stunt chops, such as Tom Cruise, have helped define this new realism, but the trend’s flipside, some stunties say, is a tendency among other actors not to credit stunt performers, or to imply that they are doing their own stunts. George Cottle, 46, a leading British stunt coordinator, says he enjoys seeing stunties calling out actors on social media who decline to acknowledge their contributions. “They’re saying, er, yes you do have a stunt double, it was me,” he says.
Ryan Gosling relied on multiple doubles in The Fall Guy, which includes several nods to classic stunts. In one scene, Logan Holladay, Gosling’s American driving double, crashes a car on a beach. It was a reference to the first “cannon roll”, which featured in the 1974 John Wayne thriller McQ. In these stunts, the driver triggers a pneumatic ram hidden on one side of the chassis. It strikes the ground while the car moves at speed, initiating a roll. Holladay rolled eight-and-a-half times, a new world record. In another act of solidarity, Gosling presented Holladay with his Guinness World Records certificate at a screening of The Fall Guy last March. “The lack of recognition, the contribution that they make to cinema, to some of the best moments in film in general… that ends here,” the actor said, while standing next to his double.
It’s a sentiment that David Holmes shares. He now lives with carers in an adapted house in Leigh-on-Sea financed by an insurance settlement. Apart from anything, the performer – who hopes one day to open a stunt school – believes recognition from Bafta and the Oscars would also help in the push for safer sets. “Somehow stunt people aren’t seen to be as credible as make-up artists,” he says. “I risked my body for the sake of storytelling.”
“A fight specialist shows me the ‘Motorola’ – when he’s shot while running, he folds himself in half in the air and lands flat on his back”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2024