It's funny, when I tell people that I'm a stunt man, a lot of them think that it's
just reckless guys trying to get hurt or showing off and not having much skill
more than gusto and balls and machoism.
It's really not. You have to be very calculated.
Stunt men are kind of expendable in the sense where if you need a lot of
people to fall down and look like they get hurt, you're gonna want to hire a
stuntman because they're gonna be able to do it over and over and over again
without actually getting hurt.
So most recently I got to work on 'Baby Driver'
where I doubled Ansel Elgort, and it has free running scenes throughout
the car chases. They had a cop car drive straight at me and I got to run on top
of the hood, plant my hand on top of the cop lights, and then kind of vault over
the car. We did that one probably 10-plus takes; they wanted it kind of messy
so that's another part, like, I didn't get to land on my feet on the other end, I
had to kind of jump over it, and then kind of just land on my side and roll out.
It was real difficult but fun, because the restrictions were, we're in
a parking garage, so I couldn't jump very high, I had to stay very low and just
enough to skim over the top of the cop car to land on the other side and just
having a car driving right at you and just running full speed to vault over it,
it's just one of those things that you don't really get to do in real life and
to actually be able to do that was amazing, I'm so glad Edgar threw that in
there in the film.
So pretty much the stunts are all fake...
To an extent. When I say that, I mean that when you see someone get punched, they're
not really getting punched, and you know we always keep it a distance here with
getting hit over here so it looks like you do the same reaction, but I'm not
hitting myself, you know, so we can continue to do it over and over, so in
that way it's fake. A lot of the fighting is all choreographed, but you are
falling, let's say you are taking reaction and you are falling on the
ground and you are hitting the ground, so that's not faked, but you can also hide
mats to enable you to do it over and over again without getting hurt as much.
This is my career. Like I said, I've been doing it for 10 years now, and I want to
keep doing it for another 10 years, and in order to do that I have to make sure
that I train in a way that keeps my body strong, that can
withstand the impacts, and that each jump I'm doing I know that there's a level of
risk, but a risk that I'm able to minimize due to my training and
preparation for all of the skills. I wouldn't have been able to be a stuntman
without my training in gymnastics and then I found out about parkour and that
alone has allowed me to excel in the stunt and have a specialty that, at the time,
weren't many people doing. Everybody used to call parkour as A to B, but
really when you break it down, parkour is using your body to move through an
environment, creating physical challenges that you try to complete. And so
basically, parkour is finding a space or any space and really just moving through
it with your body. And there's specific techniques like vaulting and jumping and
quadrupedal movement that you'll use to traverse through a space, but your goal
is really just movement, through any space and becoming the most adaptable
athlete, so when you're faced with any environment, you as an athlete, as a
parkour athlete, should feel comfortable and confident that you can move through
that space with your skill set. It's all about really finding the limits of your
body and what you're truly capable of. I've done a lot of parkour stunts; one
was doubling Paul Walker on Fast Five, and we were in Puerto Rico and we had to
run off the one rooftop of the favelas and jump about 30 feet down into another
rooftop and just crash through it, and this one was fun. It was just out of the
limit of being able to do it physically; like, you probably could do it but you would
probably wreck yourself even if they had mats, so we did have a line attached to
me and the other girl, so we had to run, hold hands, and we had our high line that
was able to decelerate us enough so we didn't break our legs crashing through
the roof, and just to have that feeling of just feeling like you have
superpowers, right? Because you're just doing this huge jump and then you just
crash (*pow*) into the floor, but having that
moment of just jumping with someone else, free falling through the air, was just an
amazing feeling, and it looked great. It came out great on the film. It's been
a fun journey. I really love stunts. I mean, I got fortunate because I
fell in love with stunts and parkour, and those have been two of my passions and
then I moved out to LA. That's how I've been able to make my career is
through parkour and stunts because my first big job was doubling Adam Sandler
because he wanted a parkour double, and they couldn't find any
parkour doubles at the time, so they just used me, which I was a terrible double,
but you can be terrible and still double someone because sometimes it comes down
just to the performance. As stunt men you're not trying to take any glory away from
an actor or or anything like that, you're trying to make the film the best it can
be and you just want the performance to look as good as it can be, and that's
what we're here to do is just to help elevate the level of performance