Ryan Gosling had to rescue Emily Blunt from a ‘monsoon’ while filming “The Fall Guy”

The two stars explain how they created their “grounded” on-screen romance and why they wanted to pay tribute to stunt performers.

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are bringing explosive chemistry — and literal explosions — to the screen.

The two actors headline David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, about down-on-his-luck stunt performer Colt Seavers (Gosling) and his director ex-girlfriend Jody Moreno (Blunt). Based on the 1980s TV show with Lee Majors, the film follows Colt as he races to save Jody’s directorial debut after her A-list star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) unexpectedly disappears.

The Fall Guy is, of course, a story about stunts, and director David Leitch packs the two-hour runtime with all sorts of explosions, falls, and jaw-dropping car rolls. (Gosling and Blunt themselves took the stage at the Oscars earlier this year to pay tribute to stunt performers, highlighting how they’re often overlooked within Hollywood.) But the film is also a love story, a charming, sweeping romance about Colt and Jody’s tentative attempts to reconnect, anchored by Gosling and Blunt’s charming chemistry.

Here, Gosling and Blunt open up about marrying action and romance — and why they wanted The Fall Guy to pay tribute to the under-appreciated world of stunts.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I spoke to David Leitch recently, and he said I had to ask you both about the day on set when it rained and you apparently almost drowned.

RYAN GOSLING: The day that Emily was too chill!

EMILY BLUNT: Yeah, this story’s ridiculous. To be fair to Ryan, I had not realized that there was a monsoon that had hit base camp. I was having a quiet little 22-minute meditation to myself, at which point my door blew open. It was like a hurricane was going on, and Ryan was like Last of the Mohicans: “You need to leave!” I was meditating, and now he thinks I meditate too much.

GOSLING: I thought you were too chill. This is a problem! You’re too zen, wading out in this knee-deep water.

BLUNT: The trailers were floating away. I mean, I was surprised that my driver, Scott, had not come and knocked on the door saying, “We should go.” Scott was just listening to Spotify.

GOSLING: I think he got washed away. I just saw his hands above the surface.

BLUNT: All I remember from that day is Aaron Taylor-Johnson taking off most of his clothes and running around basecamp in the water. He was still very much in character. Just a regular, run-of-the-mill day on set in Australia. We went to Australia for the weather, and that’s what we ended up with.

Well, speaking of Australia — Ryan, there’s a great scene in this film where you’re towed behind a garbage truck across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. From what I understand, you were actually being towed behind a garbage truck, right?

GOSLING: Yeah. It’s a great way to see Sydney. I highly recommend it. That chase took place over the course of a month, and that’s really how I saw the city. I got the garbage truck tour. But that was shot really early, which I think was really well planned because I was so tired, and I didn’t realize what I’d gotten myself into. Suddenly, I was getting dragged across the bridge, and then I went back to my trailer to sleep a little bit. I was like, “That was a weird dream. Maybe it was a nightmare?”

BLUNT: But you did it!

GOSLING: It’s weird: I had climbed that bridge 20 years earlier with my mom, so I have a weird relationship with that bridge. I can’t seem to just drive across it like a normal person.

You both have talked about this movie being a love letter to the stunt community, and obviously, your director, David Leitch, worked as a stunt performer for many years. Did you get any helpful insights or information from him about what it’s really like?

BLUNT: I just learned today from David that doing a fire burn, where you get set on fire, is actually potentially one of the least dangerous or risky things if you are covered in the [fireproof] gel and the winds are right. He said it’s one of the easiest things to do, but if it goes wrong, it can quickly become one of the most dangerous things to do. Ben Jenkin, who was one of Ryan’s stunt doubles, did the fire burn. He’d never done one before, and he was like a kid in class, like, “Me, me! I want to do it!”

GOSLING: Before the job, I guess he called our stunt coordinator, Chris O’Hara, and was like, “Is there any way I could get set on fire in this? And if it’s not too much to ask, could you also hit me with a car?” [Laughs]

You really had some impressive stunt experts working on this, from Ben Jenkin to Logan Holladay, who broke the Guinness World Record for most cannon rolls in a car. What was it like to work with all these different experts in all these different fields?

GOSLING: It’s scary. It’s exciting to watch it on screen, but when you’re there, you see how much preparation goes into it. You understand how much could go wrong. Logan Holladay worked on that cannon roll scene that he ended up breaking the world record for. We knew he was trying to break the record, so we were rooting for him, obviously. But at the same time, it’s eight and a half [rolls]. There’s a reason no one has done that, and there’s a reason that they’re rare. The weather has to be right. The sand density had to be right. They had to do it at the right time with the tide, and there was all this engineering involved leading up to it. In the movie, there’s quite a bit made of the thumbs up [after a performer completes a stunt], but you really feel the significance of it when you’re in the moment.

BLUNT: Once the car stops rolling, you’re just waiting.

GOSLING: And when you see the thumbs up, the whole crew was just elated and erupted into applause. There were a few scenes like that, like the big fall at the end of the movie with Troy Brown, as well. [Ed. note: Brown completed a 150-foot fall, landing on an airbag that was used in another project by his stunt performer father.] He called his mom right afterward, and his dad was there. Everyone was tearing up, and he signed this bag next to where his dad had signed it 20 years earlier. It was beautiful. We were kind of like, “We should make a movie about this,” and then we were like, “Oh wait, we are.”

You two presented at the Oscars this year, and there’s been a major industry-wide push for the Academy to recognize stunt performers with their own category. How did making this movie give you a new appreciation for the world of stunts?

BLUNT: For me, it just heightened it even more. We were paying such close attention to it because we were literally filming and creating a movie around them. But I’ve always just had the most endless gratitude and appreciation for what they do. They’re some of the best people on a film set. They’re the kindest, most humble, and most selfless people. They risk more than anyone on a film set, and there’s this strange illusion that they do these extraordinary stunts, and then they just disappear into the shadows and pretend that they didn’t do it, and you’re the action hero.

GOSLING: There was a moment when we were writing where I was talking to David about it. I was trying to understand the experience of it, 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. There’s this expectation for them to give the thumbs up. There’s this sense that they’re the ones that everyone doesn’t have to worry about. In a way, they make our safety the priority over their own. 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.” It’s interesting to hear the truth come out about it, and it only deepens your respect for what they do.

BLUNT: The movie explores this sort of meta insanity anyway, so for us, it’s such a delight to give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at how a movie’s made.

GOSLING: I love hearing them talk about the science of the stunt and the engineering of it all. I haven’t had a similar experience since I did this film First Man, and I was meeting with astronauts. They’re both a special breed, where they’re both brilliant and fearless. So many of these stunt guys that we’ve been working with, when you really unpack what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, it’s so impressive. I think there’s some kind of assumption that it’s just an adrenaline rush or something, and it’s way more than that. It’s an art. They design this action. It’s designed in the same way that makeup is designed in a film, or costumes, or anything else.

In addition to being a movie about stunts, this movie is really centered on this really delightful, sweeping romance, which you don’t always get in movies like this. How did you two want to approach this love story?

BLUNT: There’s a kind of nostalgia for the action-romance. I mean, it was so up my alley growing up. I think we just wanted to make sure that we approached the couple in a really relatable way, that they were kind of messy. They’re so unslick, the two of them. You’ve got these two who can’t find their footing with each other, and hopefully, you ache for them to figure it out. But I think we wanted to approach it in a really free-wheeling way that felt grounded. It’s what I love about David Leitch’s movies: They’re usually really stylistic but very grounded still. We had a lot of inspiration from David and [his producing partner and wife Kelly McCormick] who really are a love story. They’re sort of a wonderful mirror image of what we were trying to build with Colt and Jody.

I specifically want to ask about the scene where Colt breaks down crying in the car, listening to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” Tell me everything about filming that sequence.

GOSLING: I remember I cried too hard, and they cut it out. There were so many tears.

BLUNT: The amount of tears they cut in post was almost hysterical, actually.

GOSLING: It was a moment for Colt to really get it out. “All Too Well” came on, and he had a good car cry. I mean, he’d been through a lot. He was jet-lagged.

BLUNT: He’d just been set on fire. He was undercaffeinated.

GOSLING: So yeah, that song comes on, you’re going to let it rip. A little Taylor Swift comes on, you’re alone in your car in the parking lot… 

BLUNT: You think you’re in a safe space. You’re not. Someone comes to shame you for hysterically crying.

So, do you each have a personal cry-in-the-car song?

BLUNT: I find I cry on planes more. I wept to Billy Elliot the other day. I just lost it. I’m more of a plane crier.

GOSLING: I don’t think I have a go-to, like, “I’m going to put on this song and go to the car and cry.” I think what happens in the car is that a song comes on, and it hits you in that moment. It’s the element of surprise and the solitude.

BLUNT: There are many wonderful sad songs I can think of.

GOSLING: “Push It,” right? That really gets you? When “Push It” comes on, it’s just like waterworks.

BLUNT: [Laughs] “No Diggity” comes on, and it’s just like, forget it! Sobbing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.