Ryan Gosling reveals how The Fall Guy incorporated real life into scenes
Gosling stars as a stunt performer in the new action-comedy.
Throughout his career, Ryan Gosling has starred as everything from a groundbreaking astronaut to a well-known children's toy – but in his new film The Fall Guy, he's playing something a little bit closer to home: a stunt performer.
The action-comedy follows his character Colt Seavers after he's lured back on to a film set 18 months after suffering a major injury and gets caught up in a plot involving a missing actor, while simultaneously attempting to win back the affections of the film's director and his ex-lover Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt).
Gosling has worked with stuntmen since his early days as a child star in kids' show Young Hercules, and speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com ahead of the film's release, he revealed how the team behind the film – on which he also serves as a producer – wanted to make it "feel like what it feels like to make a movie".
And he also revealed that the fact the film's director David Leitch was a former stunt performer himself helped to add another layer of authenticity to the project.
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"It's only in movies where they chop things up into genres, really, right? Life is all kinds of things at once," he explained.
"And David is not afraid of that – so the film could be drama, it could be funny, it could be a thriller, it can be action, it can be all the things at once.
"And I found that was, like, what the process of making the movie was – it was just sort of always evolving," he continued.
"He's not afraid to work without a net, because he kind of always has. So that was the process, just always having it evolve."
He added that the filmmaking team were determined to make sure that anything that was happening behind the scenes on the set was reflected in the movie – which resulted in one blooper involving Emily Blunt making it into the finished film.
"Emily came to rehearsal in this big hat one day, and the helicopter kept blowing it off," he said. "And we were like, that should be the scene!
"You know, everything that was happening around us David would feather into the film, and so it really feels alive. And it feels like what it felt like to make this movie."
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For his part, Leitch said that his time as both a stuntman and a director meant that he couldn't help but inject some of himself into both Gosling and Blunt's characters.
"It was really fun to direct from a place of knowledge and experience," he explained. "You don't get to often do that as a director – you're, like, [usually] researching a world, you know, and trying to make it authentic. But this was as authentic as it could be.
"I mean, not only being a stunt coordinator, or a stunt man, and then a director, but just our film life, our collective film life.
"You know, Ryan's been on sets for, whatever, 30 years. Emily's been since she was a kid, Kelly [McCormick, producer]... all of us live that life that you see that's there.
"And so it was really fun to play in that sandbox and, like [Gosling] said, feathering in all of these anecdotes along the way."
The Fall Guy is released in UK cinemas on Thursday 2nd May 2024.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
