David Leitch explains the “Fall Guy ”joke he snuck in for his fellow stunt performers

The director and former stuntman reveals how his own experiences inspired the action blockbuster, starring Ryan Gosling as a down-on-his-luck stunt performer.

If you’re looking for someone to direct a movie about stunt performers, you’d have a hard time finding someone more qualified than David Leitch. The 48-year-old filmmaker is perhaps best known for directing action-heavy flicks like Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train, but before that, he spent years working as a stuntman, doubling for actors like Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. Now, he’s using that firsthand expertise with The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling as a lovestruck stunt performer.

Much of The Fall Guy centers on the romance between stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling) and his director ex Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), but Leitch also wanted the film to be a showcase for stunt performers, reteaming with longtime collaborator and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara to dream big. Together, they treated The Fall Guy as a “bucket list” opportunity, brainstorming impressive stunts like a 150-foot fall (performed by Troy Brown) and a jaw-dropping cannon roll (where driver Logan Holladay set a Guinness World Record by flipping a car eight-and-a-half times).

“What was great is that we really got to do big stunts and practical things,” Leitch tells Entertainment Weekly. “That was the mandate: You’re making a movie about a stuntman, so you want to make sure that the stunts are top-notch and next-level. To do that, we really brought in the super talented guys that have been doing big things and challenged them to go even bigger.”

Leitch also brought his own expertise to the shoot. Some of his past stunt credits include Fight Club, the Matrix franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum, and 300. As Gosling was preparing to play Colt, he says he frequently turned to the director for insight. He remembers one moment early in the writing process when he asked Leitch why stunt performers always seem so invincible.

“I was trying to understand the experience of it,” Gosling explains, “and he said, ‘Well, it all hurts. It always hurts. Getting hit by a car hurts. Getting set on fire hurts. And getting thrown out of a window really hurts.’ I thought, well, we have to put that in the movie verbatim.”

Gosling is no stranger to stunt-heavy projects like Blade Runner 2049 or The Gray Man, but he says working with Leitch and the entire Fall Guy stunt department gave him a newfound appreciation. “It’s interesting to hear David say it like that and hear them say, ‘There’s no trick to getting hit by a car. You’re just getting hit by a car,’” the actor adds. “It’s interesting to hear the truth come out about it, and it only deepens your respect for what they do.”

Leitch notes that the stunt industry has changed since he first started taking punches in the 1990s, and he wanted The Fall Guy to highlight the many different areas of stunt expertise — from the big falls spotlighted in the original Fall Guy TV show from the ‘80s to the VFX integration required for most modern blockbusters.

“It’s evolved a lot,” the director explains. “The generation before me in the ‘80s and ‘90s was even more practical than my generation. The Matrix was one of the first movies that I really cut my teeth on, and that was a lot of visual effects and integration with stunts. We were doing a lot of wire work and green screen, but they still needed stunt performers to be doing that stuff. I think now with the big Marvel movies, the generation after us, they do a lot of performance capture. Again, wire work is really important, but the new stunt performers have to understand visual effects. You have to understand modern filmmaking to be effective in action design.”

More than anything, Leitch hopes The Fall Guy rings true with one particular demographic: stunt performers themselves. He notes that one of his favorite jokes in the film directly targets the stunt community: Colt is telling an assistant director that nobody broke him for breakfast, and that’ll be a meal penalty.

“Stunt guys, they are obsessed with their meal penalties,” Leitch says with a laugh. “They love their SAG rules. I screened [the film] for a bunch of stunt people a couple weeks ago. That joke never gets a laugh, but I kept it in as a litmus test for my community. I mean, you would have thought it was the best joke in the world. They were all like, ‘Yeah! Meal penalties!”

The Fall Guy is in theaters May 3.

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