Stuntman Eddie Braun talk about his movie Stuntman
Stuntman Eddie Braun talks about the time Charlie Sheen gave him 1 million to stop stunting.
Video Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
EDDIE BRAUN: I'm the face you never see. You see what I do.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
KEVIN POLOWY: Let's start with the beginning of your journey, both professionally and also what ultimately led to this new film "Stuntman," and that is Evel Knievel. How did he come into your life and then influence you on your career path?
EDDIE BRAUN: I met him as a child. And in the '70s, everybody wanted to be Evel Knievel. I mean the man wore a cape. He was like a superhero rock star from Mars incarnate. Evel Knievel was everything.
I had a lunchbox that I would take to school and every day I'd sit and eat my lunch and look at the pictures on the lunchbox. My first injury, as a kid-- after meeting Evel Knievel I tried to jump my Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle over trash cans and I ate it and broke my arm. And all the way to the hospital, I couldn't have been happier because I was like Evel Knievel.
KEVIN POLOWY: That was the moment you decided, I want to be a stuntman.
EDDIE BRAUN: I really didn't know what a stuntman was. All I knew is I wanted to be like Evel Knievel. You know, I was fortunate at 17-years-old to enter the film business as a professional stuntman, then it became clear to me what it was and what I wanted to do.
KEVIN POLOWY: As you say in the film, you're so used to being the guy that we don't see. You're the stuntman. You're the guy. You're there, but we don't know you're there. And you're pulling off some of the craziest-- if not the craziest shots in the film. How did you like being front and center, the experience of being at the heart of this documentary?
EDDIE BRAUN: I'm perfectly comfortable being the guy behind the scenes. Yeah, it felt very awkward being the subject of the story. But it was my story and my truth, so good, bad, or otherwise, I'm extremely proud of it and I gave it my all.
KEVIN POLOWY: How did the rocket launch compare to your most dangerous film stunts when it came to the fear factor involved? I mean, do you even get fearful? Do you get afraid?
EDDIE BRAUN: I get very fearful. I am scared of a lot of things. I'm not this big adrenaline junkie that is fearless or-- I'm scared of-- and it's healthy. There's nothing wrong with being afraid. Hell, I'm afraid all the time. It's how one deals with their fear that defines them as a person.
KEVIN POLOWY: You've worked with so many well-known highly successful actors over the years; Brad Pitt, De Niro, you mentioned Charlie Sheen, George Clooney, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber. How would you describe-- and again, I know this might not be easy to generalize, but how would you describe sort of the typical relationship between a stuntman and actor on set?
EDDIE BRAUN: I've been fortunate that I've doubled Charlie Sheen for probably a good 30 years and he happens to be one of my best friends. We were doing a movie-- the coolest movie, probably, that I've worked on was "The Rookie" with Clint Eastwood.
And after, I don't know, five months of getting beat up, blown up, all sorts of things in that film, the very last day of filming-- believe it or not-- I had a little mishap on a motorcycle and I broke my leg on a compound fracture, which means the bones were sticking out. I'm laying in the street and my bones are sticking out of my leg and Clint Eastwood walks up to me.
And I say, Clint, is my leg still attached? How is it? I was in shock. I'll never forget, Clint glaring down at me and going, well, Ed, it doesn't look like you're going to make the wrap party, but you'll be OK. And he just kind of walked off. I'll never forget that, in shock or not.
But that was the injury. And you know, I stayed in the hospital a little bit for that. They did surgery my leg. I was fine, but Charlie came in so upset. I mean, he was like-- I had to calm him down.
And then he got frustrated and he wrote a check for a million dollars, put it in my hospital bed and said, I want you to stop doing stunts. If this is what it takes, I want you to stop. And he wrote me a check for a million dollars. And back then that was really a lot of money. Of course, I didn't cash the check. I put it away though somewhere. You never know when you need it.
But I loved "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." I mean, I think Brad Pitt nailed it as a professional stuntman.
KEVIN POLOWY: Yeah.
EDDIE BRAUN: And his relationship with the De Niro, I mean, I felt like I had lived "Once Upon a Time."
KEVIN POLOWY: That's great to hear, because you always wonder how accurate those depictions are. But you felt seen by that portrayal, which is awesome.
EDDIE BRAUN: Brad nailed it on that. He got the essence of a stunt guy. I totally believed him as the thing. He deserved to get an Oscar. I mean, that guy-- which is ironic, you know? It's funny you can win an Oscar for playing a stuntman, but you can't get an Oscar for actually being one. I don't do the things I do for those kind of accolades, but it would be nice to know that at least the Academy acknowledges it.
KEVIN POLOWY: One of the things that you guys tackle in the film is how much more difficult doing stunts can get with age. Where are you at in your career? Because you talked about hanging it up, but you're still going.
EDDIE BRAUN: You know, you never want to be the last guy at a party. I've always thought that. You always want to leave while the party's still going good, you want quietly exit stage left.
KEVIN POLOWY: Right.
EDDIE BRAUN: For me, personally, as a stuntman, I wanted to kind of segue or transition from doing stunts into producing. But I wanted to do it in a way that I thought was graceful, kind of a quiet, dignified exit stage left. And in doing that, I thought, well, you know, at the same time I'd like to pay homage to the man that inspired me from the beginning, Mr. Evel Knievel.
As a stunt performer, you have to find a way to know when is when and when enough's enough. And for me, the time just seems right to-- not that I won't stop doing stunts entirely, I will just do the less of the risky stuff. I'll let the younger guys-- men and women-- do that. And I'll sit back and watch them and applaud them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
