How Netflix's movie 'The Out-Laws’ demolished a cemetery without disturbing real graves

"The Out-Laws" puts the goofy into the bank heist film. But the Netflix comedy (now streaming) seriously steps on the action accelerator during one mayhem-filled scene featuring a getaway armored truck and pursuing police cars barreling through a cemetery, sending headstones flying.

"Yeah, that was crazy. That truck just drove through those gravestones,” says "Out-Laws" star and producer Adam Devine. “We wanted the action in this movie to be memorable. And I can say I’ve never seen a chase scene through a graveyard before."

Devine makes clear that no dearly departed were disturbed in the stunt. ”You don't have to worry,” he says. ”No actual gravestones were harmed in the making of this movie."

Filmmakers created their own cemetery in a park outside of the set in Atlanta, trimming it into shape and building more than 1,000 headstones.

"We basically built the graveyard so we could destroy it," says director Tyler Spindel. Production and stunt crews endeavored to find the right material to send the prop gravestones flying without destroying the movie’s last remaining armored car (the first truck got KO’ed during a previous stunt).

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Foam gravestones were shot down as too fake in tests (“It just looked silly,” says Spindel). So combinations of materials were tested for the breakable stones, and filmmakers settled on Styrofoam coated in plaster. The scene ends with the truck flying through a mausoleum, also made from Styrofoam blocks.

The props were so realistic that the production team asked for authentic names to be carved in.

"I put the name of a barber who gave me a really bad haircut on one, and my proctologist and a couple of my exes," says Spindel. “So if you look really closely, you’ll see actual names.”

In the scene, mild-mannered Owen Browning (Devine) is driving the truck after robbing a bank with his ”Ghost Bandits” future in-laws (Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin) in the back with the stolen loot. Dressed in a Shrek disguise, Devine shot his driving scenes on green screen in a studio. He watched with some envy as the gravestones were demolished by professionals.

“My God, I wanted to do that stunt,” he says. ”Why do the stunt guys get to have all the fun?”

Adam Devine received squirt gun training on Netflix's ’The Out-Laws’

In one ”Out-Laws” scene, Browning shows off the squirt gun he’s been entrusted with for his bank robbery.

Even handling a water pistol came with frequent warnings from the armorer, says Devine. Set protocol is especially heightened after the tragic prop-gun death on the 2021 ”Rust” set.

“After each take, the armorer would come up to me and tell me each time that I was still using a squirt gun,” says Devine. ”But it was a pretty realistic squirt gun, and there were other guns and shooting scenes in this movie, so there were serious safety precautions.”

Devine suffered for his art in ”Out-Laws,” going into the makeup chair to have a fake back hair applied for one revealing scene.

“I have my own back hair, but we needed a comedic amount,” he says. The actor insists that wasn’t as bad as getting green Shrek makeup and ears applied at 5 a.m. each morning for the robbery scene.

“It was my idea to have Owen wearing that terrible Shrek-like outfit for his robbery disguise,” says Devine. “So for weeks, I was thinking what a horrible idea it was. But it pays off in the end.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Netflix's 'The Out-Laws' crush a cemetery: How the movie stunt worked