Oscars Are Considering a Stunt Person Category After ‘The Fall Guy’

The heads of The Academy are listening to Ryan Gosling and The Fall Guy team about adding an award for stunt people at the Oscars.

“We’re talking to members of the stunt community who are Academy members about the possibility of that,” Bill Kramer, Academy CEO, said in an interview with Empire published on Thursday, June 6. “We added a new award that will launch in two years for Casting Directors … so we’re always open to those discussions.”

Academy President Janet Yang added that the committee is open to an idea that has wide support amongst the community.

“The Academy is like a living, breathing organism,” she explained. “We listen to our members, and if there’s really strong support and there’s whole mechanisms for how to advance the cause, and they’re interested… That’s what happened with Casting. We’ve created new branches over the decades. So it does evolve, and it evolves with the changing industry.”

The Fall Guy stars Gosling, 43, as Colt Seaver, a former stuntman who gets pulled back into the world after an actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes missing from a big studio movie, which is being directed by Colt’s ex-girlfriend, played by Emily Blunt.

While on the red carpet for the premiere, Gosling shared that the film was “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,” the actor said to The Hollywood Reporter in April. “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’s sentiments and respect toward the stunt community also rang true with Chris O’Hara, who served as The Fall Guy’s stunt designer. (O’Hara is the first person to be credited with that specific role as it was recently approved by SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild.)

“Ryan’s very honest. Ryan’s been honest in all his interviews. He’s like, ‘I’ve had a stunt double since I was a kid.’ And so this is one of those times that he’s not going to sugarcoat it,” O’Hara exclusively told Us Weekly in May. “He’s not going to say, ‘I did all my own stunts because he wants to draw light to what we really do and we make. In the end, we really try and make the actors look as good as we possibly can.”

O’Hara added that when people watch The Fall Guy, they’ll see how accurately it represents stunt performers.

“I think when people think of stunts, they see the big stunts that are in the movies. They don’t understand how you’ve gotten to that process,” he explained, noting that he works “hand in hand with the writers, the director, other department heads and production designer” to create what ends up on the big screen.