While The Fall Guy is one action-packed, stunt-tacular blockbuster, there's also a sweet love story at the movie's heart.
Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a former stunt performer who quit the business following a serious on-set injury. He's pulled back in, though, when he finds out his ex – Emily Blunt's Jody Moreno – is directing her first feature film, and its star is missing. Without the leading man, the film will fall apart, so Colt returns to the industry to try and save the day – though, since he ghosted Jody after his accident, things between the former flames are a little awkward.
Gosling and Blunt would improv together on the set of The Fall Guy, and, when we met with them recently, the duo filled us in on how this helped them craft a believable romance.
"We just wanted to be really relatable, and that they're a bit of a mess, they don't have these idealised movie lines of what romantic scenes normally would entail," Blunt says. "And it just felt more true to life, and I wanted to make sure that Jody was a really approachable character as well. And then discovering that Ryan loves to work in a very similar way to me, and we could wing stuff, and we can stretch it around, or it could go off the rails and it was all safe; I trusted him so much that, if you throw the kitchen sink at it, you could see what happens. It made for a couple that you could hopefully root for, and a couple that didn't really have it all together."
As Gosling explains, they brought their day-to-day experiences on The Fall Guy set into the movie, too, in a fittingly meta move. "We wanted it to feel like what it feels like to really make a film," he says. "So [we] just started taking things from what was happening on set. If we were in rehearsals, and Emily wore a giant hat that was blowing away because of the helicopter behind us, it was like, 'Oh, that should be in the scene.' She made finger guns at me and then regretted it, but it was amazing, we were like, 'Well, that should be the scene.' So, anything that was happening on the way to the set became what we incorporated into the scene."
Having David Leitch in charge also helped. "You need a director who's curious and interested and in a full embrace of that," Blunt says.
"And brave, because he's working without a net," adds Gosling. "But he's a stunt guy, so he's used to that."
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