Something we’ve noticed over the several years we’ve been giving the Stunt Awards is the extent to which the general viewing public has become better versed in the world of stunts. This has relatively little to do with our specific awards and more to do with the cultural moment from which our awards emerged: a renewed engagement with the real, the tactile, the human.
For decades, the rise of action movies as Hollywood’s dominant genre was perceived (not entirely incorrectly) as something that ran counter to the idea of cinema as a means of human expression. What happens to nuance, subtlety, complexity when everything is reduced to good guys and bad guys fighting to the death? But just as the action genre was reaching its fantastical peak, a countervailing effort emerged to highlight the truly physical onscreen. Filmmakers and audiences alike grew more aware of the fact that when we witness (“Witness!”) a great, real stunt performed on camera, we are reminded all over again that we are watching actual people doing actual things.
In many ways, this was the underlying theme of David Leitch’s The Fall Guy (winner of our Best Explosion award, and a nominee in most categories), in which a retired stuntman’s romantic quest mirrors not just the shaggy-dog mystery he finds himself tangled up in, but also his re-entry into the profession. Our stunt-double hero, Colt Seavers (played mostly by Ryan Gosling but also by a whole cohort of real doubles, including Logan Holladay, Ben Jenkin, Justin Eaton, and Troy Brown), performs more and more flamboyant stunts as his emotional journey develops. It was also the idea at the heart of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (the winner of most of our awards, including Best Action Film), in which the future Imperator Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) suffers the (thrilling, breathtaking, heart-stopping) tortures of the damned as she transforms from a shy, motherless girl in hiding to a full-fledged savior of humanity. Or think about Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, a blistering action movie built around a protagonist whose chief aim is to avoid violence; never has not killing people onscreen felt so visceral and cathartic.
All of which brings us to an unexpected place. Thanks to the stunt world, today’s action genre has become an assertion of humanity, instead of a denial of it. Addressing the fact that he famously chose not to use digital face-replacement technology during the climactic boat chase in Face/Off, John Woo (whose The Killer remake was also nominated in two categories this year) said, “The audience understands that the most dangerous action is usually played by the stunt guy … If something is memorable, beautiful, or challenging, they love to do it. In some way, I feel they have the same qualities as a ballet dancer.” Or as one of our voters put it, “Yes, it’s awesome when Tom Cruise straps his crazy ass to a plane, but it’s also amazing when some jobber can take a punch and sell it better than anyone.”
Nonetheless, stunt pros, along with other below-the-line technicians and craftspeople and artists, remain largely unknown to the general public and rarely get thanked in Oscar speeches. Hell, sometimes they don’t even get breakfast. (The IATSE T-shirt that Gosling wears in The Fall Guy is a sly nod to this, as is his brief argument over meal penalties on set and his ongoing attempts to find a cup of coffee.) Even while stunt workers are getting more recognition, there are still those in the industry who see them merely as working stiffs. It’s partly for this snobbish reason that some at the Academy remain reluctant to allow the creation of a Best Stunts Oscar.
But we won’t rehash the arguments around that matter. A Best Stunts Oscar will one day soon be a reality, and Hollywood will be a better place for it. We’ll continue doing our part, too. Here are this year’s Stunt Award winners.
Best Stunt in an Action Film
Awarded to a specific sequence in an action film that exemplifies the work of a stunt-coordination team.
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The Nominees:
The Fall Guy (the World Record Car Roll)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
Life After Fighting (Bren Foster vs. Everyone)
Rebel Ridge (Terry vs. Cops)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (the Grand Finale)
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The Winner: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
Awarded to action designer.supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director Guy Norris, fight choreographer Richard Norton, director of photography Richard Bradshaw, and director George Miller.
In George Miller’s Furiosa, action always reveals character. The film’s various chases and fights aren’t story interludes in this postapocalyptic bildungsroman about the coming of age of Imperator Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy); they are story accelerators.
In the movie’s central action sequence, a chapter called “The Stowaway,” we see the young Furiosa, after years of hiding her true identity, attempting to escape the Citadel of Immortan Joe by hiding beneath the War Rig, a giant, multi-weaponed transport truck driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). But during her escape, the War Rig is attacked by the “Mortiflyers,” aerial forces of the Octoboss, a black-clad warlord who hides his face behind a giant horned mask and rides a dark, ominous, zeppelin-sized octopus balloon. Furiosa, hiding beneath the truck, winds up fighting the invading hordes, allying herself with Jack, and joining, temporarily, Immortan Joe’s army.
The emotional centrality of the Stowaway sequence — both in terms of sheer screen time and the impact it has on our characters — is undeniable, which is probably why our voters chose it over some of other spectacular contenders. The battle of the Octoboss and the War Rig is the kind of achievement that combines every conceivable aspect of stunts into one remarkably fluid sequence. That is perhaps best exemplified in the delightful way it reduced so many of our voters into simply barking out litanies of the various elements of the scene. (“Flying wind-fan parasailers hanging off motorcycles! Pole-vaulting war boys! The Bommyknocker! A symphony of carnage.” “Each new absurd escalation — giant chains! Spikes! Hang gliders! — is like a spike of dopamine in your brain, which barely has enough time to process the last awesome thing before it moves on to the next.”)
It’s also the kind of scene that would not be possible outside of a major studio production. Miller and his team shot this sequence over 78 days, but even before then, they spent an absurd amount of time preparing for it, breaking down each section in preproduction and then designing the War Rig around the requirements of the scene. “There’s a part that happens under the War Rig, there’s a part that’s in the little space inside the cabin, then on top of the War Rig, at the back, on the front, and in the airspace up and around the road,” Miller says. “To get all those moving parts, we could evolve it with precision rather than just in the imagination or by just putting it down in words, or even just with rehearsals.” The director says that the growth of CGI aided immeasurably in designing his action sequences, as the ability to digitally erase harnesses now allows stunts to be both crazier and safer. “They’re not fine wires like they used to use in the kung-fu days that are basically lost in the grain of the celluloid,” he says. “They are big, thick things, easy for the visual effects artists to erase.
Furiosa itself is an epic, but the Stowaway sequence is a kind of epic in miniature, locating its central character in darkness, in the midst of an impossible undertaking, then watching her battle her way through the various sections of the War Rig until she emerges fully into the light. “What impresses me most about the Octoboss battle is how George Miller and his team keep every impossible feat totally legible along this streamlined vehicular narrative platform,” is how writer and editor Jacob Oller puts it. “The rig is the stage for a million little dramas, problems, fights, and fires, and it all reads perfectly clear as the madness escalates.”
Best Stunt in a Non-Action Film
Awarded to a specific sequence in a non-action film, defined as a movie not predominantly occupied by physical spectacle in the form of fights, chases, explosions, and other violence.
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The Nominees:
Anora (Keep Ani in the House)
Challengers (the Final Match)
Hundreds of Beavers (the Beaver Brawl)
The Substance (Elizabeth vs. Sue)
Thelma (the Scooter Chase)
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The Winner: Hundreds of Beavers (the Beaver Brawl)
Awards to fight choreographer Jon Truei, cinematographer Quinn Hester, and director Mike Cheslik.
No Stunt Awards category has been as consistently eclectic as this one, featuring Oscar front-runners Anora and the Substance, a Trent Reznor–scored final tennis match from Challengers, and a movie starring 95-year-old June Squibb. The nonagenarian proudly did her own stunts in Thelma’s raucous scooter-chase. “Woven into Thelma is a deep understanding of what makes action work,” says critic Brian Cartwright. “When action is escapist it touches on our desire for agency and empowerment.” These would all be exciting winners in any year but, as it maybe always will, the primal urge to see men in cartoon beaver costumes pummel a hapless hero to a pulp won out.
That’s right, the indie sensation Hundreds of Beavers and its Beaver Brawl, simply couldn’t be denied. Operating like the best live-action Looney Tunes movie that never was, Hundreds of Beavers is essentially a series of increasingly zany gags in which fur trapper fend off literal hordes of beavers. Shot in black and white with human-sized beavers, the film straddles a delightful line of cartoon, silent-film, and video-game traditions, with SVP of anime and animation at Warner Brothers, Jason DeMarco, going so far as to say: “Everything about Hundreds of Beavers is amazing. Wildly inventive and funny, it’s crazy to me that more people haven’t seen it. When people say something feels like a ‘live-action cartoon’ or a ‘video game’ I always roll my eyes. This movie though? It actually does feel like the best parts of animation and gaming together in a live-action film.”
As our “heroic” trader Jean Kayak (Ryland Brinson Cole Tews) is cornered in a small cabin by the beavers, fight choreographer Jon Truei puts on a masterclass of comedic stunt work, calling to mind some of Jackie Chan’s best fights in the first Drunken Master. Tables are broken, a beaver is thrown into a wall, glass bottles break (with the cost of their damage appearing onscreen) and a fish is used as a fire hose. It’s a feast of visual bits made all the more impressive as you can very clearly discern the men in furry beaver costumes throwing themselves around for the love of the game. “Brawling is difficult enough as it is, but brawling while wearing a mascot costume is ART,” says film critic B.J. Colangelo. “Hundreds of Beavers was the best comedy of 2024 and the Looney Tunes/Buster Keaton blend of physical comedy plus fight choreography was an absolute dream.”
Best Fight
Awarded to a hand-to-hand combat sequence that is not a shootout, though it can involve weapons.
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The Nominees
The Beekeeper (Jason Statham vs. Taylor James)
Kill (Lakshya vs. Raghav Juyal)
Life After Fighting (Bren Foster vs. Everyone)
The Shadow Strays (Aurora Ribero vs. Hana Prinatina)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (the Grand Finale)
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The Winner: Life After Fighting (Bren Foster vs. Everyone)
Awarded to stunt coordinator Mark Duncan and director/performer Bren Foster.
Perhaps our most varied category, not just in terms of scope but in place of origin, this year’s Best Fight contenders are a showcase of international superstars and independent action legends. India’s Kill gave us new heartthrob Lakshya exacting revenge on a fast-moving train. Soi Cheang gave us a Hong Kong throwback to its filmmaking golden age with Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. Purveyor of brutal, bloody violence Timo Tjahjanto reminded us why Indonesia is an action-hub with a wicked end fight between Aurora Ribero and Hana Prinatina in Shadow Strays. Even Jason Statham joined the party showing off exactly what made him a star all the way back in Transporter with a bone-snapping fight to cap off The Beekeeper. Any one of these face-melting fisticuffs could’ve taken home the crown. However, as has become a bit of a tradition here at the Stunt Awards, it was a direct-to-video barnburner that voters simply couldn’t ignore.
Bren Foster’s Life After Fighting is an unmitigated labor of love. The Aussie actor, primarily known for TV’s The Last Ship, is a martial arts icon. A black belt in four different disciplines, action fans have long known what Foster’s capable of, he simply needed the right outlet. Not content to sit around and wait for someone to create it for him, Foster went ahead and wrote, directed, produced and starred in his own independent film. The result is one of the best martial arts films we’ve seen in years. What begins as a crime drama, Life After Fighting follows Foster’s martial-arts teacher Alex, who, forced into retirement because of an injury, has found a purpose in training the fighters of tomorrow. Then some of his young students are kidnapped by child traffickers and Alex descends into the criminal underworld; nothing can prepare you for the bananas final 45 minutes as Foster lays waste to the siege of villains in his dojo. It’s the kind of jawdropping sequence that brings a perfectly solid drama into the stratosphere of modern action cinema. We Hate Movies podcast’s Eric Szyszka put it perfectly: “Just when you think the movie could use some more juice in the tank, Bren Foster kills everyone for an extended period of time.”
Oscar viewers often joke that the Academy’s awards are given to those who do the Most, not the Best. And one might be inclined to think Foster had an advantage here, because he’s not just engaging in one fight, but multiple fights stretching over the entire final act of the film. But the sheer artistry lies in the fact that any single one of these fights could have won the category. A kendo stick here, spin kicks there — it’s an astonishing series of events that demonstrates Foster’s diverse fight knowledge. He has said that he was inspired by The Raid and while that influence is worn proudly on its sleeve, Life After Fighting becomes its own beast, with Foster’s Alex locating a brutality he’d long suppressed and unleashing a vicious brand of justice that comes in a fugue state of heroism. It’s a fight film that a young filmmaker will see down the line and point to as one that changed their life. “This might be the hardest category to vote for as it’s just so stacked — Statham is on fire lately and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In floored me,” wrote Vinegar Syndrome’s Justin LaLiberty. “But I never saw Bren Foster coming and he’s such a multi-faceted talent that I can’t help but vote for him. Can’t wait to see what he does next.”
Best Shootout
Awarded to any sequence involving guns at relatively close range.
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The Nominees:
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (the Gatorland Shootout)
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (Reggie Unleashed)
Civil War (the White House Raid)
The Killer (the Church Finale)
Rebel Ridge (Terry vs. Cops)
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The Winner: Rebel Ridge (Terry vs. Cops)
Awarded to stunt coordinators Cory DeMeyers, Kevin Scott, and Keith Woulard; assistant stunt coordinator and stunt double Nico Woulard; stunt doubles Jay Hieron and Ted Barba; actor Aaron Pierre; and director Jeremy Saulnier.
Of all the Stunt Awards categories, Best Shootout conjures the most consistent expectations: lots and lots of guns, meticulously choreographed bullet sprays, high body count. Like, really high; we’re living in a post-John Wick era, after all. Most of this year’s nominees play in this familiar space, and quite entertainingly. It’s nice to see Dennis Greene, after being a franchise backup player for so long, get a chance to shine in Bad Boys: Ride or Die; his military training activating him into badass mode during a home invasion had many ardent fans among our voters. It’s also nice to see John Woo reminding us who helped pioneer bullet ballet with his remake of The Killer. And it’s also nice to see the White House destroyed at the end of Civil War? Sometimes a movie meets a certain cultural moment.
But it takes an amount of gumption — swagger, even — to do something completely different from the norm, which in this context means decreasing bloodshed instead of exacerbating it. And that approach, pulled off in such riveting fashion in the final act of Jeremy Saulnier’s social thriller Rebel Ridge, propelled it to victory in this category. As one of Rebel Ridge’s supporters (it secured nearly 37 percent of the vote, with a double-digit win over its competitors) put it in their comments, “Never seen a shootout done where the protagonist is purposefully avoiding killing anyone.” That novel ending, filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier told us, was a personal challenge to himself, given that his prior films Murder Party, Blue Ruin, Green Room, and Hold the Dark, are all dotted with explosive violence: “Can I write a script without killing everybody in it?” For a while, Rebel Ridge also seems like it might go that way. Aaron Pierre’s former Marine Terry Richmond is a physical dynamo trained in de-escalation techniques who puts racist cops on their ass, uncovers a small-town civil-asset-forfeiture conspiracy, and plans a large-scale assault on the police force that let his cousin die. When he launches a surprise ambush on the police station, and all his enemies roll up with the military-grade weaponry normalized all over the U.S. after September 11, 2001, Rebel Ridge seems like it’s going to explode.
But in this sweaty, smoky shootout, filmed in 100-degree Louisiana weather, Terry outsmarts rather than outmuscles, and outmaneuvers rather than outshoots. He’s a Black man in the small-town South, and if he kills any of these white cops, that’s a death sentence. What stands out is how Terry navigates his constraints (like when he drags the revealed police informant, played by David Denman, to safety behind a police car before the shooting starts, a move that was first filmed with Denman on a wire before Pierre asked to do the drag himself; that’s the take used) and how Saulnier and his team of stunt coordinators design, frame, and edit the action. The visual language of Westerns played a major role (“It’s all eyelines and looks,” Saulnier says) in building the sequence’s tension and driving home Terry’s distinctiveness, with the moment of him unloading a shotgun and then throwing it at an advancing cop serving as the sequence’s hard-boiled, euphoric zenith (one that required 12 takes). “I felt like when I designed the finale that I couldn’t think of another one,” Saulnier said, and that singularity is what made Rebel Ridge such a standout.
Best Vehicular Stunt
Awarded to any sequence involving motorized vehicles.
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The Nominees:
The Beekeeper (Crypto Bro Is Dragged Into the River)
The Fall Guy (the Garbage Truck Chase)
The Fall Guy (the World Record Car Roll)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
The Killer (the Bridge Flip)
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The Winner: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
Awarded to action designer.supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director Guy Norris, fight choreographer Richard Norton, director of photography Richard Bradshaw, and director George Miller.
It’s understandable that vehicular stunt was one of our more competitive categories this year. On the one hand, we had two spectacular scenes from The Fall Guy: a world-record-breaking cannon roll impeccably executed on a beach by driver Logan Holladay, doubling for Ryan Gosling (“Unbelievable — not only beating the car roll record but doing it on sand is absolutely remarkable,” remarked one voter); and an extensive fist-fight/chase sequence through the streets of Sydney in a garbage bin truck that climaxed in Gosling’s character surfing a concrete bridge with nothing more than a broken door and a shovel. Then there was the transcendent moment from The Beekeeper in which Jason Statham’s avenging angel attached a whining crypto bro to an SUV and sent it (and him) into a river — a moment that feels even more cathartic today than it did back in early 2024. And let’s not forget the bridge flip from The Killer, from one of cinema’s most legendary names. (“Artistic expression in action sequences as interpreted by one of our modern masters of the form. It is damn good to have John Woo back.”)
In the end, however, it was just too hard to deny Furiosa, and specifically its central Stowaway sequence, with its extended battle between the War Rig, the War Boys, Furiosa, Praetorian Jack, and the Octoboss’s winged motorcycle parachute skate-demons, the Mortiflyers. “It’s almost not fair to the vehicular-stunt candidates who found themselves trapped in a year when a fucking George Miller Mad Max film came out,” said one conflicted voter. “No one can step to the king of vehicular stunts.”
Best Aerial Stunt
Awarded to any sequence that takes place predominantly in the air.
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The Nominees
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (the Helicopter Hijack)
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Axel Steals a Helicopter)
Dune: Part Two (Floating Harkonnens)
The Fall Guy (the Impossible Fall)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
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The Winner: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Octoboss vs. War Rig)
Awarded to action designer.supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director Guy Norris, fight choreographer Richard Norton, director of photography Richard Bradshaw, and director George Miller.
Just like the Mortifiers rallying behind the Octoboss, so too did Stunt Awards voters. This nearly 15-minute-long chunk of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was the dominant stunt of this year’s ballot, including Best Vehicular Stunt. It’s a hard one to deny, a lengthy and elaborate sequence in which George Miller and his team (many of whom were working together again after 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road) pack as many driving, flying, parachuting, and attacking bodies and vehicles into the camera frame as possible. The War Rig (a tanker made by American truck manufacturer Kenworth) is a colossal force, a shiny and gleaming menace on the road that seems impenetrable — until the Mortifiers become the Mortiflyers, taking to the air to fight Immortan Joe’s followers on a different plane of action as Junkie XL’s percussion-heavy score thrums in the background like a chugging engine. Has a kite ever looked so menacing? Probably not, but how many kites look like a spectral cephalopod haunting the night?
Voters specifically pointed to Furiosa’s blocking, an integral aspect of the Stowaway stunt design that was inspired by western chase scenes, according to production designer Colin Gibson and art director Jacinta Leong, and meticulously planned out in pre-production with the 3-D software ProxiVP, developed by second-unit director and supervising stunt coordinator Guy Norris and his son Harrison. (Norris’s other son Harlan also worked on the film’s stunts.) The end result comprised hundreds of shots, which were then filmed over 78 days on location on a ten-mile stretch of road in Hay, New South Wales, Australia, and at Fox Studios in Sydney.
The hundreds-deep stunt team had myriad specialties — including motorcyclists, stunt-car drivers, and experts in explosives, parkour, and acrobatics — and the sequence involved wire-work for both the performers and their vehicles, including the Octo-bike. Some beats, like when a Mortiflyer parachutes up into the air, is tracked by the camera over the top of the rig, and then throws bombs down upon it, took dozens of takes. (Post-production VFX work included adding in the Wasteland environments and parachutes, and tweaking characters and vehicles.) All that effort coalesced into an assault that runs with metronomic smoothness and offers up the propulsive destruction that defines this franchise. “Much as I hate to award the same thing twice, the arrival of the flying rigs from the Octoboss’s gang is precisely what manages to elevate the War Rig sequence into an even higher tier,” one voter wrote. “Nothing else this year really compares in that domain so yeah, it wins again.”
Best Practical Explosion
Awarded to any sequence that involves any reactive substance that amounts to an explosion.
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The Nominees:
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (the Flaming Van)
The Fall Guy (the Miami Vice Showboat Explosion)
Land of Bad (the Failed Extraction Drone Strike)
The Last Stop in Yuma County (the Tanker Explosion)
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (the Dock Explosion)
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The Winner: The Fall Guy (the Miami Vice Showboat Explosion)
Awarded to stunt designer and coordinator Chris O’Hara, stunt coordinator Keir Beck, assistant stunt coordinator Leo Stripp, and director David Leitch.
There are, conservative estimate, a bajillion stunts in The Fall Guy, a movie that’s primarily a love letter to the industry, its decades-long presence in Hollywood, and the people who engineer and execute all the insane action stuff we’ve increasingly come to expect from all genres. Running parallel to that celebratory aim is a sartorial one: David Leitch’s blockbuster is also a movie about how good Ryan Gosling looks in a jacket, a sentiment that helped create the circumstances for this year’s Best Practical Explosion winner. A vintage Miami Vice Stunt Team jacket found by Gosling and his stylist Mark Avery, a riffed line from Gosling about how his character used to drive a boat with his hands tied behind his back during the Universal Studios Hollywood show, and a stunt was born that won over 42 percent of this year’s voters.
Set and filmed on the Parramatta River beside Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the Sydney Opera House in the background, the boat chase in question kicks off The Fall Guy’s final act: Gosling’s Colt Seavers has learned that the A-list actor he’s doubling is framing him for murder, and is trying to kill him, too. Colt escapes by initially driving a speedboat while facing away from the controls, evades his pursuers by zigging and zagging through the river, and then purposefully drives his boat into a floating pontoon, faking his own death via the gigantic explosion. Every film nominated in this category had its champion, but the vintage feel of this Fall Guy explosion, with Colt relying on his resourcefulness and his own experience in the Universal Studios trenches to pull off a series of boat jumps, helped propel it to victory: “Homaging an ’80s television program in a film adaptation of a different ’80s television program is incredible,” one voter said.
In reality, the “blind drive” boat had a secret area under the bow that housed the person actually driving it when Gosling’s Colt is supposedly navigating it while restrained. That first boat jump spanned 80 feet, with a 24-foot-long, four-foot-high ramp assisting in the vault, while the later pontoon explosion was created with the help of the film’s VFX team. Everyone involved deserves a victory mojito.
Best Overall Action Film
Awarded to the best film for stunt work overall.
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The Nominees:
The Beekeeper
The Fall Guy
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Kill
Life After Fighting
Monkey Man
One More Shot
Rebel Ridge
The Shadow Strays
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
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The Winner: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Awarded to action designer.supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director Guy Norris, fight choreographer Richard Norton, director of photography Richard Bradshaw, and director George Miller.
“To feel alive, we seek sensation. Any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow,” mutters Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus during his final face-off with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa. “And we need more, and each time we need more until too much is never enough.” What he says next has already entered the action lexicon: “The question is: Do you have it in you to make it epic?” That last line evokes the eye-popping, brain-melting grandiosity of George Miller’s film. But the first part of Dementus’s brief reverie, uttered at a moment when he realizes all is lost and that Furiosa has defeated him, is worth remembering, too. Because that sentiment lies at the heart of what makes Furiosa unique even in its own franchise. The more entertaining it is, and the more spectacular it is, the more the dark hole in the pit of our stomachs grows.
Furiosa pretty much ran away with this category, and it’s not hard to see why. Beyond its stunning action set pieces, beyond the return of a beloved (and Oscar-winning) franchise, beyond the love felt for its legendary, 79-year-old director, the picture speaks to something deeper. Action movies can be fun, they can be frivolous, they can help us turn our brains off — or at least, so we’re told — but at their best they can also plumb the very depths of our soul.
Furiosa might be the saddest entry in Miller’s Mad Max series, and its sensational velocity makes it even sadder. These films all exist under the sign of civilizational doom. Even the vastly more realistic (and decidedly non-postapocalyptic) first one takes place in a world where social and governmental institutions are in mid-collapse. But Furiosa carries a weight those others don’t, because it’s about a child facing the future. Over the course of these pictures, Mad Max himself has gone from a man who has lost everything to an existential ghost, a quiet and stony figure with no past and no future. But in Furiosa’s young eyes we experience the frantic desperation of someone just beginning to understand how hopeless this world is. She also sees no hope in the future, but her mind hasn’t become coagulated with nihilism just yet. So, we can sense her fear.
That perhaps reflects her creator’s own despair. If the first film was a response to the oil shortages of the 1970s, and the second to the growing nuclear anxieties of the Cold War, then this new iteration of the saga looks forward to a truly hopeless horizon. Nuclear war could be averted, and resource scarcity was often temporary, but today’s anxieties, particularly when it comes to climate collapse, aren’t about things most of us feel can be stopped. In ways no other recent movie of any genre can, Furiosa speaks to the mindset that we’re just biding our time until the inevitable calamity.
But also: “Yeah, boy! Stunts!” [high five]
Best Achievement in Stunts Overall
Awarded to the best overall stunt professional (or duo) in 2023.
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The Nominees:
Bren Foster
Chris O’Hara
Logan Holladay
Kenji Tanagaki
Hayley Wright
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The Winner: Hayley Wright
A world-record holder, the first-ever action designer, a martial-arts legend, and an indie action superstar went up against Furiosa herself. And Hayley Wright won. The first woman to win Stunt Performer of the Year, Wright was everywhere. Whether it was doubling Mia Goth in MaXXXine, stunts on Twisters, or creating a new rendition of the legendary Mad Max character Furiosa alongside Anya-Taylor Joy, Wright had a banner year for a performer who’s only been doing this since 2014. It’s as stunt coordinator Garrett Warren says, “Here’s a person that hits the ground hard and then has tier one level performance skill. She rides motorcycles, cars, trucks, fight scenes and more. You can’t deny that she deserves this award.”
Perhaps most surprising is that according to Wright herself, she only learned to ride a motorcycle while making Furiosa. “Coming from a gymnastics and Cirque du Soleil background, I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Which, maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but part of the job is being able to adapt and learn and just be dedicated and determined to being the best performer that you can be.” Wright was a gymnast in Australia from the age of 7 to 17, when she was scouted for Cirque de Solei in Las Vegas and given the opportunity to move to the U.S. Stunt pro Kristina Baskett, a close friend of Wright’s, was also performing in Vegas and was making the transition to screen stunts from live stunts. She inspired Wright to move out to Los Angeles and from there, she was off. Since joining the industry, she’s doubled Mary Elizbeth Winstead on films like Kate and Birds of Prey, she’s worked with Michael Bay on 6 Underground and she’s even appeared in Oscar hopefuls like Babylon.
It’s Furiosa, though, the role made famous first by Charlize Theron and then re-imagined by Anya Taylor-Joy, that Wright did the wildest work of her career. That instantly iconic chase through the desert, the Mad Max staple, is where Wright was able to shine brightest. “I was rigged underneath the truck and we were going about 40 miles, 50 miles an hour with me under there, and the massive wheel right by my head,” she says. “As soon as I was under there, it’s that flow state you hear athletes talk about. I just went just to focus. The truck was on the move and the whole time I’m holding my neck up and we did, I think, probably three takes in one run. By the second run and the third take, I couldn’t hold my head up.”
Though she’s responsible for the bulk of Furiosa’s stunts, Wright makes it explicitly clear that there is no character without Taylor-Joy, who she says was committed to doing as much of the action as she could. However, as with last year’s winner Vincent Buillon (who helped make John Wick’s stair fall so funny), it’s Wright’s physicality in tandem with Taylor-Joy that fleshes Furiosa out.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Awarded to a trailblazer in the field of stunts whose commitment to the craft has shaped the world of action.
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The Recipient: Eunice Huthart
There are few people who can lay claim to having an instantly iconic film debut. Some wait years for one line or scene that enshrines them in the annals of cinema, but for Eunice Huthart, making an impact was on the agenda from day one. Cast as Famke Janssen’s stunt double in 1995’s GoldenEye, Huthart didn’t deliver a piece of dialogue as much as she flexed muscle to make it into Bond Girl history. That famous thigh squeeze Xenia Onatopp uses to dispatch her foes? “Yeah, that’s me,” laughs Huthart.
Read more about our Lifetime Achievement honoree here.