After premiering The Fall Guy at SXSW on Tuesday, Ryan Gosling made a quick trip to Los Angeles for a special screening on Wednesday night.
He was joined at The Grove by director David Leitch and co-stars Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham and Stephanie Hsu, as they gave the crowd an early sneak peek of the film. The project stars Gosling as a stuntman who left the business and is drawn back in when the lead of a movie (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) that is directed by his ex (Blunt) goes missing.
“I was on a kid’s action TV show called Young Hercules, and I’ve basically had a stunt double my whole life,” Gosling said of his longtime relationship with stuntmen. “There’s this sort of accepted dynamic where they come on set, they do all the cool stuff, they risk everything, and then they disappear into the shadows and we all pretend as if they were never there. Everyone else on set gets credit, but there’s kind of unspoken understanding that they won’t,” before jokingly declaring, “That ends today!”
He continued, “It took like eight stunt performers to make one Fall Guy, and there were times when I was like, ‘Should we be making a movie or robbing a bank? Because this is kind of the greatest bank-robbing team’… it was like the Avengers or something, and a lot of them probably were the Avengers, if you look at their CVs. I’ve benefitted from their work and their help since I started, so to be a part of telling their story and in some small way trying to reflect how vital they are and how important what they do is.”
One of the film’s specific stuntmen, Logan Holladay, was specifically recognized at the screening, as he was presented with a Guinness World Record title for doing the most cannon rolls in a car — reaching eight and a half rolls during one scene while performing as Gosling’s stunt driver. Gosling noted that in the film, “He’s buckling me into a car for a stunt he’s about to do. And then he goes on to do eight and a half cannon rolls, which is a world record, and then he pulls me out of the car and pats me on the back for the stunt that he just did. In any other movie, you wouldn’t know that, but in this movie you do.”
Leitch, a former stunt performer himself, also noted how personal the movie is for him, saying he wanted it to be “not just a celebration of action films but a celebration of the stunts and stunt people behind the scenes, the unsung heroes who really do risk their lives to bring you some of the most memorable sequences in film, and the hard work they put in and the joy they have doing it.”
Waddingham joked on stage, “I feel like in a different life, if I actually had balls to do it, I would have quite liked to have been a stuntwoman. I actually said this to David and [producer] Kelly [McCormick], and then they realized that I could do a bit of it but it was quite limited, and so the stunt community probably don’t have to worry about me joining them.”
The Fall Guy hits theaters May 3.
