Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are honoring the man who made their latest film possible.
The “Fall Guy” (2024) stars attended a special screening of the action comedy Wednesday in Los Angeles. Mere days after delivering a tribute to stunt performers at the Oscars, they presented “Fall Guy” stuntman Logan Holladay with a Guinness World Record.
His death-defying feat? Doing eight and a half cannon rolls in a car for the first time ever.
Universal Pictures noted in a press release that the cannon roll is “a classic stunt dating back to the early days of cinema” and involves “fitting a cannon-like apparatus” under a car — which “shoots toward the ground” while driving — to propel it “into a series of rolls.”
Holladay pulled that stunt off in a Jeep Grand Cherokee and dethroned previous record-holder Adam Kirley, who completed seven cannon rolls for the James Bond film “Casino Royale” (2006), and said Wednesday “it was a surreal moment” he’s “incredibly proud of.”
He added in a statement: “After two practice runs and one real take, we had one car and one shot left. I had a pretty good feeling that I had broken the record [after hitting eight and a half rolls] because it felt like the spinning was never going to stop.”
Guinness said the stunt was filmed in Australia in 2021 but “kept under wraps until now.”
The David Leitch movie follows stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling) as he doubles for action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) for a film directed by his ex-girlfriend (Blunt). When Ryder ominously vanishes, Seavers embarks on a high-octane rescue mission.
For Gosling and Blunt, who respectively said in their tribute Sunday that stunt performers have “been such a cubical part of our industry since the beginning of cinema” and are “the unsung heroes” of Hollywood, a blockbuster homage to these performers is long overdue.
“There’s this sort of accepted dynamic where they come on set, they do all the cool stuff, they risk everything, and then they disappear into the shadows and we all pretend as if they were never there,” Gosling said Wednesday, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Gosling, who added that he’s “basically had a stunt double my whole life” after starting his career on the “Young Hercules” series, appeared sincere in his frustration about this “unspoken understanding” — and cheekily joked it “ends today” because of his comments.
As a former stuntman himself, Leitch was reportedly intent on “making a love letter” to the craft with his new film. While Gosling braved some moments himself — and told People, “They dropped me 12 stories off a building” — he’s still blown away by Holladay’s work.
“He’s buckling me into a car for a stunt he’s about to do,” he said Wednesday. “And then he goes on to do eight and a half cannon rolls, which is a world record, and then he pulls me out of the car and pats me on the back for the stunt that he just did.”
Gosling continued, “In any other movie, you wouldn’t know that, but in this movie you do.”