As he introduced The Fall Guy world premiere at SXSW, Ryan Gosling had one promise: “Don’t worry; I’m not going to sing.”

It was worth clearing up. Scarcely 48 hours after Gosling and co-star Emily Blunt were celebrated as nominees at the 96th Academy Awards the pair pulled up to Austin’s Paramount Theatre on the back of a pickup truck, with motorcyclists performing roaring stunts on Congress Ave. to herald their arrival.

Though I can confidently predict that the nearly 1,300 audience would’ve still loved to hear an ‘I’m Just Ken’ reprise, the vehicular tricks felt like a much more fitting introduction for an action rom-com that doubles as an enthusiastic celebration of the stunt community.

“This is a sincere tribute to the unsung heroes of the film industry, propelling stunt performers to the forefront,” Jeremy shares in a four-star review. “And on that note, the stunt work in this film is some of the best I’ve witnessed in a Hollywood blockbuster in recent memory.”

All filmmaking is personal, but The Fall Guy feels especially so for director David Leitch, who worked as a stuntman for years before moving behind the camera, executive producing the John Wick series and directing the action-heavy blockbusters Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde.

Speaking to Letterboxd on the red carpet, Leitch told me, “I really wanted to highlight the artisans that make the movie and how they love films, too. When you see Winston [Duke’s] and Ryan’s characters talk about movies, that’s not unlike every stunt person on set. They all love movies. They’re not jaded, begrudged workers. They’re working those fifteen-hour days and risking their life because they love making films and they love them themselves. It’s really a love letter to them, but also to moviegoers.”

That old-school nostalgia can be felt especially in Leitch’s approach to the stunts. “We wanted to do grounded practical stunts and really tried to do them for real,” the director explained. “Things that may have gone to the CG in the past couple years, we were going to take on so you feel that visceral nature on screen.”

“It was pretty amazing that Universal really got behind the idea that we wanted to do these giant stunts practically that don’t happen as often as they used to,” added producer Kelly McCormick, Leitch’s wife and creative partner. “The high fall is the highest fall in ten years. There’s a car jump over this crevasse that literally did not look like we ever should have done that in the history of our lives. But of course, we had the best drivers and the best stunt teams to make sure that it was [as safe] as possible, and that’s really the key.”

Perhaps fitting for The Fall Guy ethos, Gosling performed a few of the movie’s stunts himself. One sequence required the actor to essentially surf on a metal scrap piece while hanging onto a shovel as he got dragged across Sydney Harbour Bridge one very early morning. To hear the details from Gosling, the wee hour tactically kept the actor sleepily pliable. “It was very smartly planned because I was just so tired,” he recalled to me. “They dragged me across a few times and then I went back to sleep. And I was like, ‘That was a weird dream—or was it a nightmare?’”

But although Gosling gamely stepped up to the plate for a few stunts, he made a point throughout the premiere to shine a brighter light on the team of stunt performers who helped create Colt. As he put it on the red carpet, “It basically took five stunt doubles to make one ‘fall guy.’”

Expanding on his collaborators’ talents, he remarked, “Logan Holliday was my stunt driver in this. He’s like Gene Kelly on wheels. There’s nothing he can’t do. He broke the Guinness Record for most cannon rolls in a movie. Anytime someone gets set on fire or gets hit by a car or does anything cool and parkour-like, that’s Ben [Jenkin]. Troy Brown did this incredible high fall—it was, like, 150 feet, I think. Justin Eaton did all the martial arts. Chris O’Hara was our amazing stunt coordinator.”

The accomplished stunts consistently earned cheers from the Paramount crowd, but to focus on the action only tells one part of the story. The Fall Guy is also, as Mattea exalts, a movie featuring “Ryan Gosling crying to ‘All Too Well’… Emily Blunt karaoke musical number… the split screen montage where they’re discussing Julia Roberts rom-coms….. I LOVE FUN CINEMA WITH SEXY PEOPLE!!!!!”

She explained, “We both really love to improvise, and I think that helps because then you capture these rare moments that are not scripted. They come out of nowhere. They make you laugh on the day. The camera sees how fresh they are.”  Aka, bing-bing-bing.

The blend of action and romance is a “tricky line” and “both are equally relevant and important in our movie,” Blunt added. “My favorite love stories are the ones that aren’t too serious, too earnest. They’re messy. They’re chaotic. They’re life! We wanted to humanize the love story, and the two of them are a mess. They just can’t get it together and can’t figure out how to be together. It was just so much fun to play with the messiness.”

I’ll leave you with a request from Ben: “Let’s get that Best Stunt Oscar category up and running NOW.”