Ryan Gosling reveals Oscars reason for The Fall Guy campaign

The Fall Guy's Ryan Gosling was in full force for his movie's Los Angeles premiere Tuesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

At the red carpet, Gosling was flanked with stuntmen fighting, falling and riding motorcycles all over the Dolby Theatre. Hollywood Boulevard was turned into an actual movie set, with two stuntmen doing wheelies on their motorbikes down the press line. Another jumped off a multi-story platform and down on to the entrance.

The actor stood between two of his stunt doubles, all three of them dressed in matching pastel suits. His doubles were then ripped from where they stood back through the poster behind them.

After Gosling reprised his Saturday Night Live Beavis and Butt-Head skit with Mikey Day, he changed back into his suit to address the audience.

The Fall Guy as a love letter to stunt performers

“Obviously this a love letter to the stunt community, they are the hardest-working people in show business. They risk more than anyone. This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar,” he said.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science currently doesn't have a category to recognize achievements in stunt work at the Oscars.

“I don't know what to say, how do you say thank you to someone that got set on fire eight times for you, jumped from a helicopter, rolled a car eight times for you — this is just such an example of what they do for us, what they contribute to cinema, what they risk for all of us,” Gosling explained.

He added, “It's really been an honor to be a part of something that tells your story in some small way.”

The Fall Guy follows the story of Colt Seavers (Gosling), who retired from stunt work but returns to help look for the missing star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) of his ex-girlfriend Jody Moreno's (Emily Blunt) action movie.

Blunt gave her thoughts on why she thinks stuntpeople have been long been unrecognized.

“I think we're all really baffled by it because they are the unsung heroes of our industry, I don't know why they live in the shadows; maybe their incredible humility and the fact that they want to maintain the mystique for audiences, to give audiences that sort of sense of wonder that it's the actor doing it,” she told THR.

“But I just feel that we're past that point, there is no mystique to making movies now. We see the behind-the-scenes of prosthetics and all of that, so why don't we see the behind the scenes of how a stunt is designed by these incredible performers?” the actress added.

Should the Academy Award include a category for stunt work?

While Gosling has five stunt doubles in the movie, he does some of the stunts himself, which includes a fall from a 12-story structure. Director and former stuntman David Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick pondered on the decision for the actor to perform the stunt.

McCormick said that it “was really a big gauntlet for him in his experience of Colt Seavers. And the day that he did it, I may have been bawling my eyes out because I was watching from below and he was way up high. I trust the system and I trust the team, but there was something so emotional and beautiful about him trusting them too and going out there and going for it, as scared as he is of heights.”

Leitch added, “It was really thrilling and sort of like the moment we knew he was really embracing the character full-on. He was a great partner all the way through the movie and that was sort of one physical demonstration of it. He was ready to do any of the stunts that we’d asked him to do.”

Historically speaking, the earliest stunt performers were from the circus, specifically the trained gymnasts and acrobats. They were originally called, in French, cascadeur. The word comes from the archaic French for fall.

Later on, the German and Dutch circus used the word kaskadeur. In the 19th century, Wild West shows which featured traveling vaudeville performances in North American and Europe started calling these dangerous actions stunts.

One of the most famous stunt men turned actor and director is Jackie Chan. In more recent years, John Wick director Chad Stahelski started out as a stunt performer. His stunt credits go back to 1993 and his most recent one is 2018's Deadpool. He's now in charge of two franchises for Lionsgate, John Wick and Highlander.