The ‘Fall Guy’ Filmmakers Have a Cause: Give Stunts an Oscar

The life of stuntmen and women is never glamorous. The job is to take the fall, endure the pain, break the bone, then walk away — unsung, battered and bruised. They usually move on to the next gig without ever seeing the finished product. They rarely get invited to the movie premiere. Oscars? Forget about it.

That narrative seems to be changing with the new action-comedy-romance “The Fall Guy,” the loose film adaptation of the 1980s television show that opens Friday. The movie, directed by the former stuntman David Leitch, stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a down-on-his-luck stuntman who returns to set after a nasty accident to solve the mystery of a missing leading man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and, more important, to get the girl (played by Emily Blunt).

Not only does the film give the best portrayal of the life of a stuntman since Burt Reynolds starred in the 1978 action comedy “Hooper,” directed by another ex-stuntman, Hal Needham, but so much of the promotional efforts have placed the stunt crew front and center, including the newly minted world-record holder Logan Holladay (he rolled a retrofitted Jeep Grand Cherokee eight and a half times) and the high-fall virtuoso Troy Lindsay Brown. They and two others served as Gosling’s doubles in the film.

At the Berlin premiere, the team broke through a brick wall with another double, Ben Jenkin, riding on the hood of a truck. In London, Holladay wheelied in on a motorcycle and Jenkin crashed through some breakable glass.

And on Tuesday at the Los Angeles premiere, Brown tumbled from a 45-foot-high scissor lift onto a blowup mattress and Justin Eaton, another Gosling stunt double, engaged in a three-way fistfight with all of the performers breaking through another sheet of faux glass. Then Jenkin flipped from the balcony of the Dolby Theater onto the stage moments before Gosling took the mic to declare, “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”