The Fall Guy, which tells the story of Ryan Gosling‘s down-and-out stuntman, fully embraced the action at its Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday, with stuntmen fighting, falling and riding motorcycles all over the red carpet.
Held at the Dolby Theatre, the premiere transformed Hollywood Boulevard into its own movie set, as two stuntmen did wheelies down the press line on their motorbikes, followed by another jumping off a multi-story platform onto the carpet entrance. Then, Gosling stood between two of his stunt doubles from the film — all dressed in matching suits — as the performers were ripped through the step-and-repeat. Later, three stuntmen broke though glass to enter the carpet and fight each other in front of the crowd; and right before the screening, another jumped from the balcony of the Dolby down onto the stage to join the cast.
Gosling — who on top of all of that, made an appearance alongside Mikey Day as Beavis and Butt-Head, from the Saturday Night Live sketch they appeared in earlier this month, before changing back into his suit — told the audience, “Obviously this a love letter to the stunt community, they are the hardest-working people in show business. They risk more than anyone. This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.” (The Academy currently doesn’t recognize a stunt category at the Oscars).
“I don’t know what to say, how do you say thank you to someone that got set on fire eight times for you, jumped from a helicopter, rolled a car eight times for you — this is just such an example of what they do for us, what they contribute to cinema, what they risk for all of us,” the star continued. “It’s really been an honor to be a part of something that tells your story in some small way.”
The film follows Gosling’s Colt Seavers, who has retired from the business but returns to find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s (played by Emily Blunt) blockbuster film. On the carpet, Blunt weighed in on why she thinks stuntpeople have been underappreciated for so long.
“I think we’re all really baffled by it because they are the unsung heroes of our industry, I don’t know why they live in the shadows; maybe their incredible humility and the fact that they want to maintain the mystique for audiences, to give audiences that sort of sense of wonder that it’s the actor doing it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I just feel that we’re past that point, there is no mystique to making movies now. We see the behind-the-scenes of prosthetics and all of that, so why don’t we see the behind the scenes of how a stunt is designed by these incredible performers?”
Gosling has five stunt doubles in the film, but does some of the work himself, including a 12-story fall. Director David Leitch (a former stuntman himself) and producer Kelly McCormick reflected on that the decision for him to do that stunt, as McCormick said it “was really a big gauntlet for him in his experience of Colt Seavers. And the day that he did it, I may have been bawling my eyes out because I was watching from below and he was way up high. I trust the system and I trust the team, but there was something so emotional and beautiful about him trusting them too and going out there and going for it, as scared as he is of heights.”
“It was really thrilling and sort of like the moment we knew he was really embracing the character full-on,” Leitch added. “He was a great partner all the way through the movie and that was sort of one physical demonstration of it. He was ready to do any of the stunts that we’d asked him to do.”
The Fall Guy hits theaters on Friday.