Emmy-Nominated 'Sunny' Stunt Coordinator Takes Us Inside the Fish Factory

As final-round Emmy voting gets underway (now through Aug. 28), Yahoo TV is taking an inside look at one of the most fun categories: Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Comedy Series or a Variety Program. Today, Marc Scizak, who received his third straight nomination for his work on FXX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, walks us through Dee’s epic fish factory fall in the episode “The Gang Spies Like U.S.”

Related: Emmy-nominated ‘Community’ Stunt Coordinator Takes Us Inside the Paintball Episode

How did you pull this off?
Well, first off, there’s a shot of her [Kaitlin Olson] through the window, and she’s on a ladder. That was actually done on the stages. The fish factory has a window up there, but it actually doesn’t have an office, so we built an office to make it seem like there was an office up top that she was going to. We had it on a raised platform, and I had a real ladder that I was pulling out from under her and she was going to a pad. So that part was the actress — we used Kaitlin for that.

The next piece is her tumbling to the ground, and we used a green screen. I had them build out of wood a setup that was the same angles as the fish factory was — so she hits the conveyor belt, then she hits the top of the fish catcher, and then she hits the ground. So it’s a locked-off camera in the same configuration, but it’s a green screen that we’re actually shooting on.

We tried it with and without a wire, and actually ended up using a wire to help her spin a little faster to make it look a little bit more intense and more painful. I just kind of wrapped the wires around the stunt double, and she unwinds, like actually comes down like a yo-yo. It adds a little bit of speed and a little bit of roughness to it. We rehearsed it for a good day. I did have a little bit of pads out underneath the green screen, but you don’t want too much, because then you’ll see it sort of squish. She has to take a pretty hard hit on all three of those surfaces in order to make it look real.

That was a working fish factory, and you can’t really tell, but there’s actually a pretty big size difference from the first thing she hits to the second thing she hits. So if we actually did it at the real fish factory, I would have had to have the fish factory for a day and it would have been a much bigger [production].

Looking at your IMDb page, you do comedy (including The Goldbergs and its Ferris Bueller’s Day Off car jump homage), and drama (including Kingdom and the upcoming Fear the Walking Dead and Heroes Reborn). Is there a difference when you’re working on the different genres?
Yeah, there definitely is a difference. In drama, we go a little bit bigger. In comedy, you can’t come in and make it this huge thing because a lot of times, it actually takes away from the humor of it. I mean, we’ve done major, major fights — like the one that I was nominated for last year. We made it like we were shooting a fight scene in a feature, but there’s a lot of lightheartedness throughout it that only works if you sort of go the one direction with it as opposed to going huge.

When we drove the forklift into a shelving unit [in “The Gang Spies Like U.S.”], I had a stunt driver driving that thing, and again, we tried to make it as small as possible given the situation, because we had real fish and things falling on them and it was a real shelf. So that was definitely an interesting one, but we made it safe as possible and then we went for it.

It sounds like a fine line to walk: You want some authenticity, but you also want to protect a joke.
Yeah. We don’t want to take away from, especially from Kaitlin. She is, to me, one of the most underrated women in comedy. She is so incredibly talented and so incredibly funny. Her face [on that ladder] makes that whole thing work, and in a drama situation, it would be completely different.