The Action Scene explores the form, history, and visceral power of action cinema through its set pieces.
Clockwise from top left: The Fall Guy (David Leitch, 2024), In the Shadows (Ric Roman Waugh, 2001), Kambakkth Ishq (Sabbir Khan, 2009), and Hooper (Hal Needham, 1978).
Invoking both the stuntman and the scapegoat, the title of The Fall Guy (2024) pithily encapsulates the film’s plot: after a literally backbreaking high-fall-gone-wrong derails his career, stunt performer Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) resumes the job for a blockbuster project helmed by his ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt), only to be framed for a murder committed by the actor he doubles (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Indeed, stunt performers have physically “taken the fall” for onscreen stars for most of film history, weathering the scrapes, burns, bruises, and fractures that go into constructing visceral spectacle, but their labors have gone mostly unrecognized by the general public. The Fall Guy presents an ironic inversion: whereas Colt gets in trouble because he is visibly linked to something he didn’t do, real-world stuntpeople have remained largely anonymous in relation to their work.
In Hollywood, this anonymity has been a structuring component of the star system. As media historian Jacob Smith notes, the creation of the stunt double as a distinct role coincided with the rise of the Hollywood studio system, during which the onscreen star became a precious, insured commodity that had to be preserved and protected; prior to this, hard and fast distinctions between actor and stuntperson didn’t exist, with some performers—such as aerial stuntman Ormer Locklear and western genre leading men Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson—starting out in stunts before switching to acting.1 This financial need to safeguard the star meant that riskier, more dangerous work had to be delegated elsewhere. The “elsewhere” became stunt work, whose professionalization entailed recruiting and training workers specializing in bodily disciplines such as gymnastics, horseback riding, precision driving, and stunt flying. Rather than relying on what action scholar Lauren Steimer describes as a “deskilled labor force of extras, offered a salary adjustment as compensation for the dangers they faced and injuries they endured,”2 stunting became a profession that drew performers from live traditions such as rodeo and the circus and, after the breakdown of the studio system, cohered around various stunts organizations such as the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures (SAMP), the Black Stuntmen’s Association (BSA), the Stuntwomen’s Association of Motion Pictures (SWAMP), and Stunts Unlimited (before SAMP’s founding, most stunt workers were dually represented by the Screen Actors Guild [SAG] and the Screen Extras Guild [SEG]).3
Acting and stunt performance became mutually exclusive career paths. Those stars who did some of their own stunts—Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Pearl White, Douglas Fairbanks—were the exceptions that proved the rule. The mystique of the star depended on the precarious labor of anonymous stunt performers; this anonymity—reinforced by minimizing publicity around stunt work—was essential for maintaining the unity of the star image, creating the illusion that the actor was doing the stunts. The integral yet unacknowledged nature of stunt work led Smith to call the stunt double the “structuring Other” of the star,4 and anthropologist Sylvia J. Martin to associate the stuntperson with the Freudian “uncanny of the double.”5
“They’re in almost every movie,” narrates Colt in voice-over at the start of The Fall Guy. “You just don’t know they’re there. ’Cause that’s the job. They’re the unknown stunt performers.” To expose and counteract the “stuntman’s paradox”—the idea, as Smith quoted from the Stunts Unlimited website in 2004, that “the more successful [stunt performers] are, the less they are known”6—is a central conceit of the film, borne out in various scenes depicting the procedural details and the physical as well as professional challenges of stunt work. The Fall Guy joins a long and eclectic tradition of movies about stunt performers, through which a cinematic mythology around stunts has emerged, shaping the public’s understanding of the profession.
In Hooper (Hal Needham, 1978), the actor strikes the starting pose for the stunt (top), after which the stuntman takes over to perform the stunt itself (bottom).
The most iconic movie in this subgenre is probably Hooper (1978), helmed by stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham, who regularly doubled for star Burt Reynolds and whose real-life friendship with the actor inspired the Dalton-Booth relationship in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019). Hooper establishes many of the tropes that will return in The Fall Guy, such as mining the stunt performer’s invisibility for absurdist comedy. In one scene, the filming of a stunt—ziplining from a rooftop before dropping three stories down, all while carrying a small dog—begins with the actor at the starting point, rope clasped between his hands. “Action!” yells the director, the actor does a tiny hop, then it’s “Cut!” and he’s showered with compliments and pats on the back. The stunt double, Sonny Hooper (Reynolds), then takes over to perform the actual maneuver. After seamlessly executing the stunt and painfully climbing to his feet, Sonny is greeted only by a fellow stunt performer and an incensed animal rights activist, with the director and most of the crew not even paying attention.
Physically demanding stunt work was a hallmark of 1980s and ’90s Hong Kong cinema, which, despite having more flexible insurance regulations that allowed actors to take greater physical risks, still utilized stunt doubles.7 Nonetheless, the phenomenon of what Steimer calls the “stunting star”—the star who does their own stunts—became the industry’s calling card, and thus ripe for satire. During a live stunt demonstration in High Risk (1995), a stunt double (Jet Li) high falls off a roof while the star, Frankie (Jackie Cheung)—a thinly veiled parody of Jackie Chan—races down the stairs, dressed in the same clothes. Upon landing, the two switch places, hidden by a circle of crew members; it is the star who stands up for the paparazzi’s cameras, seeming to have done the fall himself, while the double slips away through the crowd.
In High Risk (Wong Jing, 1995), the stuntman executes the high fall (top), but it’s the actor who emerges for the paparazzi (bottom).
A scene on a film set in the French romantic comedy L’animal (1977) depicts a similar scenario: a stunt performer (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes a tumble down a long flight of stairs and lands behind some bushes, after which the star (also Belmondo)—who had been crouching there ahead of time—leaps to his feet, unscathed. The scene is farcical on at least two levels. The first is the casting of Belmondo as both double and star, which playfully literalizes the idea of doubling and emphasizes that, in fact, Belmondo was one of those few who did his own stunts. The second is the fact that the stunt occurs not once but five times, the director blithely requesting each take despite the double’s increasingly battered appearance.
This scene from L’animal embodies another key trope in movies about stunt performers: an emphasis on injury and death, the risks that constitute the profession. In stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh’s In the Shadows (2001), the inciting incident is a stunt gone wrong in which an overpressurized air ram—a pneumatic device used to launch stunt performers into the air—leads to a horrific death amid a fiery building collapse. The slasher movie Stunts (1977) offers a clever variation on the “make it look like an accident” trope, in which someone starts killing stuntpeople by tampering with their equipment—a job made easy by the fact that stunt work, by design, involves putting oneself in harm’s way. In The Stunt Woman (1996), which depicts a Hong Kong stunt double (Michelle Yeoh) being stretched thin by the job and life, scenes of bodily strain abound, from a pulverizing wire pull that dislocates her shoulder to a film shoot in which she has to execute grueling choreography while on her period. End-credits behind-the-scenes footage reveals that a high fall off an overpass onto a moving truck—a maneuver successfully completed within the film—resulted in Yeoh being seriously injured in real life, a sobering coda that brings home the dangers of the profession.
Top: the end credits for The Stunt Woman (Ann Hui, 1996) reveal that Michelle Yeoh was badly injured during one of the stunts. Bottom: after having his harness tampered with, a stuntman falls to his death in Stunts (Mark L. Lester, 1977).
The omnipresent threat of injury and death is often augmented by melodramatic scenes of friends and relatives begging their loved ones not to take on a big stunt or looking on anxiously as it’s being performed. From the girlfriend in Hooper (Sally Field) to the wives in Lucky Devils (1933) (Dorothy Wilson) and Kinji Fukasaku’s Fall Guy (1982) (Keiko Matsuzaka), these characters emphasize the pressure stunt work places not just on the performer’s body but also on their relationships. The fact that these supporting players are typically women reinforces what Martin and Smith have observed as the gendered nature of the profession: stunt work and its depictions have historically been dominated by men and align with stereotypically masculine notions of toughness and physicality. The Stunt Woman represents a rare case where the experiences of a stuntwoman are placed center stage; in the documentary Stuntwomen: The Untold Story (2020), interviews with various female stunt performers and stunt coordinators highlight both the extraordinary achievements of stuntwomen throughout film history as well as the obstacles they continue to face on account of their gender, such as having their expertise second-guessed by male peers and being required to wear more form-fitting clothes that leave less room for protective padding.
A different kind of power differential lies at the heart of The Stunt Man (1980), about a Vietnam veteran named Cameron (Steve Railsback) who hides out from the cops by becoming a stuntman for a war picture whose director (Peter O’Toole) seems willing to push his new crew member to dangerous, even lethal extremes for the sake of “art.” Smith observes that The Stunt Man—as well as the novel on which it was based—draws an analogy between the figure of the stuntman and that of the soldier, and, correspondingly, between the director and the general. The stuntman has their boots on the ground in the trenches, physically braving the threat of death and bodily destruction while the director commands from a distance. In a striking scene, The Stunt Man shifts from the filming of a shootout into the action being depicted “directly.” Almost completely omitting cutaways to the production crew and their equipment, the scene instead organizes the editing around Cameron and his surroundings so that it seems like he’s actually being shot and shelled at. Evoking the ballet centerpiece of The Red Shoes (1948), in which immersive framing and cutting transform a staged production into a window onto the heroine’s haunted psyche, the scene also viscerally underlines the stunt performer’s status as an exploited body, made to do the dangerous dirty work for those in positions of power.
Top: immersive framing and cutting in The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, 1980) cement the stuntman-soldier analogy by making it feel like Cameron’s in an actual war zone. Bottom: a raucous party in 800 Bullets (Álex de la Iglesia, 2002) exhibits the stereotype of stunt performers as earthy, communal, and working-class.
As the most powerful person on set, O’Toole’s director is comfortably out of harm’s way and, at crucial moments, literally high above the fray. He begins and ends the film in a helicopter and repeatedly rides on a crane, hovering over the cast and crew like a malevolent god (or, as the film’s poster suggests, the devil himself). From up high, danger is distant and abstract, the gains of seeing the “big picture” offset by a disconnect with the experiences of those on the ground.
This distinction between high and low has a class inflection. Drawing on existing stereotypes, many movies about stuntpeople depict stunt performers as working-class manual laborers boasting a strong sense of camaraderie with peers, as conveyed by scenes of charmingly “unclassy” horseplay and revelry: a drunken bar brawl in Hooper, a wedding reception turned slapstick melee in Kambakkht Ishq (2009), and a rowdy, Wild West–themed costume party in 800 Bullets (2002). In contrast, above-the-line talent—the director, producer, or lead actor—are often presented as snobbish and unsympathetic. First seen with a sweater draped preppily over his shoulders, the director in Hooper consistently prioritizes artistic vision over financial and safety considerations. Upon arriving at the filming location for his picture’s explosion-filled climax, he remarks, “It has a nice grayness, like La Strada.”
In the opening scene of Ozploitation oddity Deathcheaters (1976), whose plot concerns two ex–Vietnam commandos turned stuntmen (John Hargreaves and Grant Page) recruited by the Australian government to raid the lair of a Filipino crime lord, Hargreaves’s stunt performer quips that his dog isn’t impressed by the battle scene they just shot because it’s a “cultured hound” that “thinks people who work for a living are common.” This joke elicits an indignant response from the monocled, beret-wearing, German-accented director (Drew Forsythe): “Is that what you think this is? Working for a living?” “Yep,” replies the stuntman. Perhaps the most unflattering portrait of directorial arrogance can be found in a film as early as The Lost Squadron (1932), which pits a trio of all-American, ex-army stunt flyers against a cartoonishly draconian director (Erich von Stroheim) whose thick German accent, sartorial dress, and outlandish cruelty (he intentionally damages the steering mechanism of a plane in an attempt to kill one of the stuntmen) embrace the Hollywood tradition of conflating villainy with European aristocracy.
Movies about stunt work don’t always depict the profession as a solely torturous affair. Stunt performers are often portrayed as thrill-seekers, doing the job not just out of remunerative compulsion but because they want to. “If I don’t scare myself on a regular basis, I’ll shrivel up and die,” remarks the stunt coordinator character (James Caan) from In the Shadows. This sentiment is also evoked in Deathcheaters, which suggests that stunting is not only work, but also a mindset and a way of life. When, during a film shoot, a police pursuit whips by the set, the two stunt performer protagonists drop what they’re doing to give chase, ultimately catching the criminals for no apparent reason other than the exuberance of the act. In Death Proof (2007), real-life stuntwoman Zoë Bell (playing a version of herself) expresses a similar zest for movement and adventure: her one wish upon visiting the United States is to buy a white 1970 Dodge Challenger—the vehicle featured in the classic car movie Vanishing Point (1971)—and ride on its hood while a partner drives at high speeds.
Top: stunt performers join a police chase in Deathcheaters (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1976). Bottom: real-life stuntwoman Zoë Bell rides on the hood of a white 1970 Dodge Challenger in Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007).
In real life, stunt work is not merely about thrill-seeking. It requires training, practice, and extensive planning. Whereas daredevils thrust themselves into dangerous situations purely for the adrenal kick, stunt performers and coordinators seek to create a “controlled environment”—a phrase used in both the Martin article and The Fall Guy—in which danger is minimized.8 Caan’s character from In the Shadows emphasizes that stunts involve both “brains and balls,” and, in interviews she conducted, Martin found that stunt performers repeatedly distanced themselves from daredevils, who lack the same commitment to reducing risk and reproducing results. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of movies about stunt work is a focus on preparation: carabiners being clipped, crash mats being inflated, fire-retardant gel being applied, maneuvers being previsualized.
Simultaneously courting and mitigating real danger, stunt work occupies a liminal zone between artifice and authenticity. Various films about stunt performers have exploited this liminality—the blurred line between real and fake, uncontrolled and controlled—for dramatic effect. These films often ask whether skills honed for filmmaking can translate into real life. Yeoh’s character in The Stunt Woman can execute choreography for the camera, but can she take on real gangsters? Colt Seavers can drive and flip a car on set, but can he navigate an actual high-speed pursuit involving armed thugs? The Fall Guy playfully inverts this logic in a moment when the “fake” movie skill of pretending to be shot—flailing one’s body beneath an imaginary hail of bullets—saves Colt’s life.
Top: Colt, participating in an actual car chase in The Fall Guy (Davi Leitch, 2024). Bottom: a stuntman (Dennis Hopper) teaches the art of the movie punch in The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971).
The converse line of questioning also applies: can a real-world hitman (Matthew Modine’s character in In the Shadows) or an actual soldier (Cameron in The Stunt Man) succeed as a stunt performer? It may be tempting to assume that “real” fighters—trained martial artists, for example—can shift effortlessly into screen fighting, but fighting “for real” and fighting for the camera are two different things. Consider the movie punch: a good-looking punch involves passing one’s fist in front of another fighter’s face, who reacts as if being struck. On camera, this hit will look convincing, while maintaining the cardinal rule of safety: no one was actually hurt. As a concise, easily demonstrated distillation of the art of screen fighting, the movie punch is a common touchstone in movies where stunt performer characters teach the technique to neophytes (and, by extension, to the viewers), from The Last Movie (1971) to In the Shadows.
Films about stunt performers sometimes offer visual approximations of the polished final film their characters are working on, highlighting the means by which stunts become cinematically mediated. In Ride On (2023), the filming of a fight scene shifts into footage from the “finished” version, complete with a change in color grading (steelier blue tinting), dramatic postproduction touches such as slow motion, and rapid cutting that heightens a sense of dynamism and staccato impact. By switching from a behind-the-scenes perspective into a more explicitly cinematic register, the scene foregrounds how stunt work synergizes with other filmmaking components to produce visceral spectacle. Following a glitzy opening credits sequence, the largely Hollywood-set Indian romantic comedy Kambakkht Ishq launches into an explosive fight scene that feels immersive until the final visual punch line: after the stuntman (Akshay Kumar) lands a high fall out of frame, the actor Brandon Routh (playing himself) stands up in his place, sporting the same clothes and hairstyle. Only then is the spell broken, retroactively defamiliarizing the filmmaking elements, stunts included, that make the preceding set piece so propulsive. In the Shadows contains an even pithier deconstruction of action filmmaking: we drop into a fight scene in medias res, but because Foley sounds have not yet been applied, it becomes amusingly apparent that the punches are connecting with air and we are watching a film shoot.
Original footage of the actor (top), onto which Colt’s face is digitally superimposed (bottom), in The Fall Guy (David Leitch, 2024).
The topic of mediation returns us to The Fall Guy: Colt is only able to be framed because his face has been seamlessly digitally grafted onto video footage of the perpetrator. In a slick deployment of Chekhov’s gun, the digital scanning of Colt’s body had occurred in a much earlier scene as part of now-standard digital VFX procedure, which allows the star’s face to be applied to the stuntperson’s body. As Steimer notes, such processes have become the industry norm since 2014 and potentially exacerbate the stuntman’s paradox.9 No longer must the stunt double’s role be masked through blocking and cutting, in which the double’s face is kept off-frame or turned away from the camera. Now, the masking can occur in-frame through digital superimposition. In The Fall Guy, the very postproduction process that pastes the actor’s face over the stunt performer’s—thus intensifying the latter’s erasure—is ironically used to paste the stunt performer’s face over the actor’s. Colt is “framed” in a quite literal way: for the first time in his career, he finds himself placed emphatically in frame for all to see.
And yet, although the film gestures toward its nefarious potential, digital technology isn’t portrayed as evil. In Jody’s film within the film—which, despite being a big-budget commercial picture, is celebrated as a vehicle for her personal artistic expression (a case of Hollywood self-flattery, no doubt)—CGI is widely used. Combining physical sets, costumes, and stunts with computer-generated objects and backdrops, this project presents digital VFX as just one element in the contemporary filmmaker’s toolkit, implying that authenticity and artifice are entwined in all aspects of production. One crucial scene is both emotion-baring and intensely mediated: everyone is in costume against a clear blue sky that will be digitally populated with space ships (we see glimpses of this footage throughout the scene), and Colt and Jody talk in code, disclosing their romantic feelings in the guise of speaking about their characters (“Hey Colt, if Space Cowboy had to say something, if he was forced to say something, what would he say?”). In the film’s climax, the two of them try to scare a confession out of the actor-antagonist by pretending to shoot before a blue screen, then dropping the sheet and accelerating the vehicle onto physical terrain. Playfully referencing CGI’s cultural association with deception but, simultaneously, highlighting the blue screen as a physical object, the moment reminds the viewer that digital VFX is not simply an “easy way out” but itself requires physical equipment and material labor.
Top: the blue screen as a physical object in The Fall Guy (David Leitch, 2024). Bottom: the setup for a CGI-rendered version of a key stunt in Ride On (Larry Yang, 2023).
Furthermore, while CGI can obfuscate the labor of stuntpeople, it can also make stunt work safer. In a pivotal moment in Ride On, an aging stuntman (Jackie Chan, playing a version of himself) and his stunt horse arrive to shoot a scene for a film tribute to Hong Kong’s golden age. Since the stuntman rose to fame as a member of a generation renowned for doing their own stunts, he is chagrined to see that the filmmakers intend to render the bulk of his big stunt using CGI. Protesting this choice, he insists on actually performing the stunt as a way to honor the “spirit of the stuntman,” but, upon approaching the brink of a dangerous leap, he changes his mind. “The true spirit of the stuntman has never changed,” he explains to the director and stunt coordinator afterwards. “Brotherhood and family need to be protected.” In this case, he is referring to his horse, whom he had nursed from infancy and who would have been endangered by the stunt, but his words also express shifting generational attitudes surrounding responsible stunt work.
Both Ride On and The Fall Guy register the ways the profession is changing. Despite paying homage to one of the most virtuosic eras of stunt performance, Ride On suggests that this older production model may have been—at least in part—dangerous and irresponsible, and that digital VFX can function as a corrective. Evoking both continuity and change, the film’s English-language title captures the need for the profession to adapt, but, as The Fall Guy emphasizes, stunt work also hasn’t gone away: car flips, fire stunts, high falls, and wire pulls still play a major role in the digital age, working together with other domains like cinematography, sound, and VFX. Movies about stunt performers invite us to be more attentive to the profession’s craft, the embodied experience of stuntpeople, and how these fit within a rapidly transforming film industry.
- Jacob Smith, "Seeing Double: Stunt Performance and Masculinity," Journal of Film and Video 56, no. 3 (Fall 2004). ↩
- Lauren Steimer, “All Guts and No Glory”: Stuntwork and Stunt Performers in Hollywood History," in A Companion to the Action Film, ed. James Kendrick (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019): 244. ↩
- Steimer, 248–249. ↩
- Smith, 38. ↩
- Sylvia J. Martin. “Stunt Workers and Spectacle: Ethnography of Physical Risk in Hollywood and Hong Kong,” in Film and Risk, ed. Mette Hjort (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 97. ↩
- Smith, 35. ↩
- See Lauren Steimer, Experts in Action: Transnational Hong Kong-Style Stunt Work and Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩
- Martin, 107. ↩
- Steimer, Experts in Action. ↩