Being a stunt double is the hottest job in Hollywood – so I tried it myself

Stuntman on fire

In a sheltered life based largely at a desk, I have managed to avoid any sort of scenario in which head-butting seemed like a good move. Now I’m being asked to do it with conviction. And it feels so weird that I’m struggling not to laugh at the same time, which makes me feel like even more of a psychopath.

To be fair, the stakes are high. I’ve been taken hostage by captors unknown and am being frogmarched towards an uncertain fate.

As a menacing man approaches, I kick him in the stomach. And so begins the ‘choreo’ (fight choreography) that I’ve been trying to memorise.

Simon Usborne fights his way out of a sticky situation – Cian Oba-Smith

I turn to the baddie to my left and – WHAM! – toss her to the floor. Now I turn to the right and – BOSH! – I swing my head at Nikita Mitchell, a 34-year-old former dancer who was recently Margot Robbie’s stunt double in Barbie. But, being much taller than her and lacking physical finesse, I feel like one of those fighting giraffes on David Attenborough’s Africa series.

‘Cut!’

Ian Pead pauses the melee to offer some head-butting advice. He knows his stuff; the wiry, 46-year-old former martial artist has worked as a stunt performer and coordinator for more than 20 years. He wants me to adopt a wider stance and move my whole body into the head-butt rather than just thrashing my head. I should also angle my face towards the camera.

I manage a slightly more composed head-butt before I take on more assailants. None of the blows connect, but when the camera position is right, the viewer sees no gap between fist and face. With each hit, stunties, as they call themselves, fall away, grunting and groaning with total commitment to the scene.

I have come to a studio space at the back of a theatre in Harlow, Essex, at a critical time for a profession and tradition that is as old as celluloid. As demand grows for ever more dramatic and gritty action scenes, so the pressure builds for the stunt people who put their necks on the line without – as they see it – proper recognition.

Pead is here with a dozen members of the British Stunt Register (BSR), a directory of 450 coordinators and performers first issued in 1973. Members must pass rigorous tests in six disciplines, from fighting to driving, horse riding, scuba diving, swimming, rock climbing and gymnastics. And they’re in serious demand as Hollywood studios and TV streamers exploit Britain’s talent, tax breaks and infrastructure, including studios at Pinewood and Leavesden.

‘Not long ago you’d have performers who might work a handful of times a year and do something else on the side,’ says James Cox, 39, a member of the BSR committee who has doubled for Daniel Craig. ‘Now people join the register and they’re working the next day.’

At the same time, a close-knit fraternity that has operated in the shadows is karate-kicking its way into the limelight. ‘Back in the day, stunt people were almost these kind of mythical figures, but now people are more intrigued about what we do,’ says Bobby Holland Hanton, 39, a British stuntie and one of the most in-demand doubles in the business. The former gymnast posts frequent behind-the-scenes snippets to his social media, where he has almost 800,000 followers. (With his stacked body and square jaw, it helps that he looks more like a movie star than many movie stars.)

A week before Pead teaches me to fight, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt introduce a tribute montage to Hollywood’s ‘unsung heroes’ at the Academy Awards. The footage includes Buster Keaton in action, as well as more contemporary scenes. Gosling and Blunt are the stars of The Fall Guy, a big-budget love letter to the stuntie community that hits UK cinemas next month. Its director, David Leitch, is a former stuntman and a producer of the John Wick films.

The Oscars moment seemed heartfelt enough, but landed as an empty gesture for some in the business, after decades of campaigning for an awards category for stunts. ‘I didn’t even watch it because I’m boycotting the Oscars until they give us an award,’ says Eunice Huthart, 57, a leading British stunt coordinator and former double for Angelina Jolie. She got her break after appearing in the original Gladiators TV series in the early 1990s.

Bafta, too, has no stunt category in its film awards, despite also honouring make-up and hair, and casting (a casting Oscar is due to be introduced in 2026). Last month, a stunt performer was nominated at the Bafta Television Awards – but for a documentary about an accident that left him paralysed on the set of Harry Potter in 2009. David Holmes, who co-produced the film, was rehearsing for his final outing as Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double when he was yanked too hard by a wire while pretending to be struck by a giant snake.

Greg Powell, the cigar-chomping, plain-speaking stunt coordinator for all the Potter films, is still haunted by the accident. He sees a cruel irony in Holmes’s nomination. ‘If David has to break his neck to get a Bafta, then you can poke that up your arse, because he should have got one for his work in the films,’ says Powell, 69, an old-school titan in the profession who appeared in the first BSR 51 years ago. ‘Studios are making millions out of action movies but I think people still don’t understand what goes into it.’

In Harlow, Pead is now conducting a reactions demonstration. ‘One of the biggest things for us is learning to die well,’ he says. Two by two, the assembled stunties run forwards before Pead shouts ‘Bang!’ at which point they must die. They flop, they roll, they slam on their faces. Pead says the Band of Brothers series (2001) required so much of this kind of death that war films often still call for ‘Band of Brothers’ reactions. ‘We also like to say, “Cut the strings,” as if you’re a puppet,’ he adds.

In brasher action movies, dying stunties might be asked to go ‘full Hollywood’. Tom Rodgers, a fight specialist who joined the stunt register in 2010, shows me what is known as a ‘Motorola’, after the old folding flip phones; when he’s shot while running, his legs come forwards as he folds himself in half in the air and lands flat on his back.

I feel winded just watching him. Yet performers rarely have the luxury of the foot-thick crash mats that they’re dying on today. They sometimes do the same stunts on concrete with hidden pads and back protectors. They must also often consider their resting place. ‘If you’re locked into continuity, you might need to be a dead body on the floor for three days,’ Pead explains. Rodgers, who’s 33 and looks like a slightly rougher Jason Statham under his Yankees cap, adds, laughing: ‘I always try to land on someone else.’

This is bread-and-butter stuff for stunties starting out, who must be able to fight to a high level in at least one discipline, such as boxing, karate or taekwondo, to make it on to the register. Firearms training isn’t required but after the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust in 2021, the BSR began offering firearms courses to members and trainees as part of a wider push to raise standards.

Stunt performers have traditionally often transitioned from other careers, perhaps in dance or sport. But as demand rises with awareness of the life of a stuntie, Cox says new recruits, who used to be in their late 20s or early 30s, often now want to start training straight out of school. The industry is also working hard to become more representative, he says; despite recent improvements, men on the register still outnumber women by five to one, and more than 90 per cent of members are white.

Stunt training

Cox says there is no equivalent of the BSR in the US, where several stunt teams operate on an invitation-only basis and there is no formal training. Joining the British register requires investment; it can cost around £10,000 to train for the driving test alone. But the rewards can be big; nearly all BSR members are part of the Equity union, which sets a minimum day rate for stunt performers of £500 for TV and about £650 for film. Specialists can command much more, while doubles for major actors are paid out of the talent’s contract, and can earn tens of thousands of pounds a week. ‘You can certainly live a very affluent life, but you’ve got to think about how high the standards are, and about the risks,’ Cox says.

The first audited stunts involved fees of $5 during the filming of the 1908 silent picture The Count of Monte Cristo. In one scene, an unnamed man was asked to swim out to sea and disappear underwater. When he stayed under longer than expected, the director was reportedly more concerned about his $20 wig than the performer himself.

Soon cowboys, rodeo stars, war veterans and vaudeville performers including Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton began to fill demand for big-screen stunts. In the 1930s, Yakima Canutt, a rodeo star, worked with John Wayne to develop the first fighting techniques, many of which are still in use. Later, working as a coordinator in the post-war craze for ‘swords and sandals’ epics, Canutt staged the chariot race in Ben Hur (1959), a 78-horse spectacular that took a year to plan.

Greg Powell, whose father and uncle were stuntmen, started working in the 1970s, a golden era for the profession as the rise of martial arts movies and more sophisticated technology pushed boundaries. Meanwhile, the Bond movies were cementing the UK’s reputation for derring-do. ‘We were a different breed,’ Powell says. ‘Even before you train as a stuntman, you’ve got to want to jump off that building, crash that car or get set on fire.’

From the early days of Hollywood, accidents have been the price of action. David Holmes was 17 when he started work on the Potter films and remains a close friend to Daniel Radcliffe, who appears throughout his documentary. The stunt that went wrong is known as a ‘jerk-back’, in which harnessed performers are yanked backwards on a wire to simulate the effects of a big blow or explosion. For reasons neither Holmes nor Powell have discussed publicly, an oversized counterweight was added to the other end of the wire. The jerk-back left Holmes hanging like a rag doll. ‘I knew I’d broken my neck straight away and within a week I knew my career was over,’ he says.

Daniel Radcliffe with David Holmes – JohnWilson/HBO

The accident led to big changes on sets, where precision pneumatic rams now control jerk-back wires. Cox tells me health and safety advisers, traditionally the enemy of good stunts, are a fixture of any set. Yet disasters are still alarmingly common. In 2015, Olivia Jackson, a South African stunt double based in the UK, was struck by an oncoming camera crane while she rode a motorbike at 43 mph on the set of a Resident Evil film. She lay in a coma for days and lost an arm. In 2017, John Bernecker, an American, died a day after falling on to concrete while filming the Walking Dead TV series. A month after that, Joi Harris, also American, was killed in a motorbike crash on the set of Deadpool 2.

Powell is characteristically phlegmatic about such dangers. ‘Every stunt is a risk, big or small, it’s the name of the game,’ he says. But he supports the push by the profession – and by Olivia Jackson in particular – for better safety protocols and studio accountability. Risk hit home for Powell again in 2019, when Joe Watts, Powell’s future son-in-law (his daughter, Tilly Powell, is a stuntwoman), suffered brain damage when he landed head first on concrete during a balcony fight scene on the set of a Fast & Furious film. A safety line had become detached from his harness. Like Holmes, Watts, who was working as Vin Diesel’s double, was forced to retire.

When I think of stunts I think cars, and a rich Hollywood tradition that arguably entered the modern era with Smokey and the Bandit (1977), which was directed by former stuntman and Burt Reynolds collaborator Hal Needham (their bond later inspired the relationship between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).

A few days after my fighting lesson, I arrive with modest ambitions at an Army barracks on a disused RAF airfield in Rutland. Drivetac, which occupies a couple of stout buildings next to the old runway, is a precision driving academy that the BSR uses to train and test stunties. They start small, in a fleet of battered Ford Fiestas equipped with hydraulic handbrake levers that rise up above the gearsticks.

Simon at the stunt driving track, looking very calm while a car blazes narrowly past him – Cian Oba-Smith

‘Faster. Faster. Faster… Pull!’ Ailis Smith, 28, a rookie stunt performer from Buckinghamshire who made it on to the register in 2022, is in the passenger seat as I speed rather too conservatively towards a human-sized plastic barrel. My job is the easiest in the business – stopping on a mark. I need to slam on the brakes at 40 mph and stop within three inches of the barrel.

Pulling back on the ‘hydro’ locks the rear wheels and sends me into a skid. I then have to balance that with the footbrake, which controls my front wheels. The first time I do it, I stop way short of the barrel. The second time I send it flying halfway to Peterborough. I improve but don’t manage the three-inch gap. ‘On set, you’ve got to get it right 10 out of 10 times,’ says Lloyd Bass, 55, a grizzled stunt driver and coordinator from Kent who’s been watching us.

Next, I slalom through cones as Smith coaches me to steer way more aggressively than I would even in a dodgem. It’s the kind of driving that might be needed in a chase scene. She then teaches me how to do handbrake turns through 90 and 180 degrees (180 is way easier, it turns out). Later, she takes me for a ride round the drifting course. The steering wheel of her more powerful Nissan sports car turns like a salad spinner as she skids around tightly spaced barrels. ‘My legs are shaking!’ she shouts as we come to a stop – she says the adrenalin gets her every time.

Ailis Smith was tasked with showing Simon the ropes – Cian Oba-Smith

Car sequences are a good example of a recent drive towards greater realism in cinema, after decades in which many big-budget movies got carried away with the early promise of computer-generated imagery (CGI). ‘Even Marvel’s new MO is that they want to try to be as practical and in-camera as possible, which is great for us,’ George Cottle, 46, a leading British stunt coordinator, tells me from his office in Atlanta on the set of Thunderbolts, a Marvel movie. (Cottle, incidentally, holds the honour of being credited for stunt work on both Barbie and Oppenheimer.)

The son of a boxer and go-kart ace from south London, he was 16 when he started making the teas at Pinewood Studios in the 1990s. That eventually led to a job on Die Another Day, which included a car chase that took six weeks to film on a frozen lake in Iceland.

Doubling for the villain, Cottle drove a green Jaguar in pursuit of Bond’s Aston Martin. ‘I can still remember getting changed after the first day,’ he recalls. ‘I just couldn’t stop laughing and jumping around, it was crazy.’

Cottle, who went on to become Christopher Nolan’s go-to stunt coordinator, says the vogue for realism requires innovative ways to put actors in the action. Bass is often called on to drive a pod car, an adapted vehicle that a stunt driver can control from within a rooftop roll cage, while the actor pretends to drive in the car itself.

In The Batman (2022), when Colin Farrell’s Penguin is being chased by the Batmobile, Bass is the guy driving between speeding trucks while being pelted with rain machines on the car’s roof. But Farrell really was in the car, on the road, looking terrified and reacting to every move (a car without the pod then repeats the sequence to get the wider chase shots).

Gone are the days when a barely ruffled actor would suddenly appear after after a clunky cut from his double. ‘These days it’s all about trying to blend the stunt performer and the talent seamlessly,’ says Bass, who has driven for dozens of stars, and wore a wig to double for Helen Mirren in the 2021 instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise (‘I also had a shave that day,’ he adds).

Stars with genuine stunt chops such as Tom Cruise have helped define this new realism, but the trend’s flipside, some stunties say, is a tendency among other actors not to credit stunt performers, or to imply that they are doing their own stunts. ‘The unknown stuntman… we know how it goes,’ says Bass, after my humbling introduction to stunt driving. Cottle says he enjoys seeing stunties calling out actors on social media who decline to acknowledge their contributions. ‘They’re saying, er, yes you do have a stunt double, it was me,’ he says.

Loyal doubles form symbiotic relationships with the talent. When Eunice Huthart, who had been flipping burgers before Gladiators, doubled for Angelina Jolie on Tomb Raider (2001), they formed a partnership that lasted for several movies and earned Huthart a role as godmother to one of Jolie’s children. She says doubling is about a lot more than standing in for an actor during the stunts themselves. ‘I used to mimic the way she stood and walked,’ she says of Jolie. ‘She’s left-handed so I trained myself to do everything left-handed.’

Bobby Holland Hanton has doubled for Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor in the Avengers films, for almost 15 years. He says good doubles train stars, learning what they can and can’t do and protecting them on sets, like a cross between a coach and a bodyguard. Doubling can also involve drudgery that it doesn’t make financial sense for the talent to perform; Tom Rodgers recently had to run repeatedly up and down some stairs in place of Jason Statham for a drone shot on a Guy Ritchie film. ‘By the end I was like, “OK, I can see why you didn’t want to do this one,”’ he recalls.

But then comes the reward; the big set-piece. Huthart’s favourite stunt was a jump from a waterfall in Thailand while she doubled for the French actor Virginie Ledoyen alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach (2000). ‘I had to leap out more than 30 feet to avoid hitting solid rock,’ she says. ‘I watch it now and I can see my fists are clenched, my jaw’s clenched… Every little nerve ending in me was alive, it was an amazing feeling.’

Ryan Gosling relied on multiple doubles in The Fall Guy, which includes several nods to classic stunts. In one scene, Logan Holladay, Gosling’s American driving double, crashes a car on a beach. The location was a reference to the first ‘cannon roll’, which featured in the 1974 John Wayne thriller McQ. In these stunts, the driver triggers a pneumatic ram hidden on one side of the chassis. It strikes the ground while the car moves at speed, initiating a roll. Bass tells me he once used a cannon to flip a Land Rover five times in a budget-blowing stunt on Emmerdale.

Holladay was doing 80 mph when he flicked the switch. He rolled eight and a half times, a new world record. In another act of solidarity, Gosling presented Holladay with his Guinness World Records certificate at a screening of The Fall Guy last March. ‘The lack of recognition, the contribution that they make to cinema, to some of the best moments in film in general… that ends here,’ the actor said while standing next to his double.

It’s a sentiment that David Holmes shares. He now lives with full-time carers in an adapted house in Leigh-on-Sea financed by an insurance settlement. Apart from anything, the performer – who hopes one day to open a stunt school – believes recognition from Bafta and the Oscars would also help in the push for safer sets.

‘Somehow stunt people aren’t seen to be as credible as make-up artists,’ he says. ‘I risked my body for the sake of storytelling.’

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