Chris O’Hara is sharing all the ins and outs of the work that goes into designing the stunts in the new action/comedy film, The Fall Guy, and how the movie accurately represents stunt performers.
“I think when people think of stunts, they see the big stunts that are in the movies. They don’t understand how you’ve gotten to that process,” O’Hara, who was given the first-ever title of stunt designer, exclusively told Us Weekly.
Noting that he and his team work “hand in hand with the writers, the director, other department heads and production designer” to “create what the end sequence is going to be for the stunt,” O’Hara said that he hopes his title change will serve as a tool to “educate people that what we do is more on a grander scale than just the cool stunts.”
He adds, “It’s designing, it’s the engineering, it’s the safety, all of the steps that go into seeing what’s exciting.”
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In the film – based on the ’80s television show of the same name – Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a stunt double for Hollywood hotshot Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) working on the set of ex-girlfriend Jody Moreno’s (Emily Blunt) blockbuster film. After Tom disappears, Colt finds himself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy involving the missing actor and sets out on an action-packed journey to find him.
As for how the movie accurately represents his craft, O’Hara tells Us that every nuance moviegoers will see in The Fall Guy is “all real.”
“That was one beautiful thing about making this movie is that we had David Leach as our director, and David and I grew up in the business together,” he explained. “And so all of these little nuances to the film business are there. We want to be really true to our craft. It’s all kind of the real kind of vibe. And you really feel – I don’t know when Ryan’s playing that character. I really feel like he’s really playing a stunt guy. He really embraced it and he did a great job.”
O’Hara – whose training as a college gymnast helped propel his career as a stunt designer forward – also told Us that Gosling, 43, had “four doubles” on set: Logan Holiday, who grew up racing motocross; Ben Jenkin, a parkour and free-running expert; Troy Brown, son of “one of the greatest high fall stunt performers in the business” Bob Brown and Justin Eaton, an “amazing martial artist.”
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“It’s a film that basically highlights a stunt performer, so all the stunts are going to be bigger,” he said. “You want the best guy to perform these stunts. Some movies don’t require [four stunt performers]. Some movies you can have an all around guy that has enough knowledge of a lot of the aspects of stunts to pull it off as one guy. But when we’re going where we went on The Fall Guy, we just needed the best of the best.”
The Fall Guy is now out in theaters nationwide.
With reporting by Kat Pettibone
