Inside the Gym Where Epic Movie Stunts Are Created

This story is part of Men’s Health‘s Action All-Star series, which explores the ingenuity, fitness, and bravery it takes to make the jaw-dropping movie and TV scenes we all love. Read all the stories here.

YOU HEAR THE action at 87North before you see it. Swords shingging and clashing together. Thuds as grapplers slam each other to the padded floor. Fists and feet slapping against focus mitts, heavy bags, and the occasional face. But for the frequent bursts of laughter and breaks in the action for commentary and suggestions (“Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?”), you might think you were visiting a training facility for real-life superheroes. And in a sense, you’d be right: 87North, housed in a converted church in East Hollywood, is the world’s premier action-design stunt-training facility. Wrestlers struggle for control of a dummy knife. Acrobats hurl themselves like human missiles through the air. A squad of stunt performers work on “pre-viz”—action choreography worked out and filmed prior to shooting. Keanu Reeves and Ryan Gosling drop in to hone their heroics for new projects.

No day is like the next. If Santa’s elves made action movies instead of children’s toys—and lived on protein shakes instead of candy canes—this would be their workshop. “When I was coming up, there was no school for stunts,” says cofounder and action director David Leitch, 54. So he built one. Compact, witty, and surprisingly soft-spoken for a guy whose stock-in-trade is roundhouse kicks and car crashes, Leitch is a martial-arts fiend who cut his teeth in Hollywood as a stunt double for Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Later, he made a name for himself as a stunt performer on action movies like the Matrix franchise and 300. Since cofounding 87North with his wife, producer Kelly McCormick, in 2019, Leitch has brought his bare-knuckle action approach as a director on movies like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train, and The Fall Guy.

The couple’s signature: wide shots and long takes of flailing, fighting, falling bodies. Real impact, real stakes, and real risk. In that sense, their movies are throwbacks to a pre-digital age when the only way to convincingly show a person falling off a 100-foot tower was to film someone falling off a 100-foot tower. “A lot of studios will say, ‘Let’s just do that with blue screen,’ ” says Leitch. “What we do is so much more visceral.”

Their main competition these days, of course, is digital. “We’ve been in a long-term relationship with CGI and AI,” says McCormick, the company’s steady-hand-on-the-wheel visionary. “Now it’s time to go to therapy.” As AI continues to grow, she says, “we’ll need to make a plan to move forward in a way that’s beneficial to filmmaking—while also supporting a human, artisan workforce.”

Putting that brand onscreen is a painstaking process—and a cerebral one. Though every performer has their specialty—martial arts, falling, driving, parkour—most are conversant in several fighting styles and experts at falls, jumps, flips, and wirework. In the studio’s invitation-only fight classes, performers learn to solo and improvise with kicks, flips, punches, and throws the way a dancer might with pirouettes and tour jetés—not only as the components of an athletic skill but as the building blocks of a creative language. “The moves are real,” says the studio’s grappling instructor, Hugh Fitzgerald, 55, a Zen-like jujitsu expert and former collegiate wrestler. “An arm bar is an arm bar; a choke hold is a choke hold. But at the end of the day, it has to translate to the screen and tell the story.” That requires a level of craft beyond the ability to memorize complex choreography and execute cool-looking moves.

The goal: to discover a sequence or style that could serve as the basis for a character or even a franchise, the way close-quarters combat with handguns—a hybrid they call gun fu—became foundational to John Wick. As conceived by Leitch and his codirector Chad Stahelski, the original Wick was built so that each fight had stakes that were equal parts physical and emotional. “There are a lot of stuntpeople that are ‘spectacle for spectacle’s sake,’ ” says Leitch. “They’re just thinking, What’s the cool gag? And they’re not really thinking about the character’s arc.” When John finally confronts his archnemesis at the end, Leitch says, “you’re so vested in the character that it’s much more memorable.”

Didi Alaoui is a parkour expert from Morocco and a winner of the Red Bull Art of Motion competition, in 2019. See him next in Warriors of Stone.

It’s not all fun and games: Part of what makes stunt work compelling to watch—and perform—is the element of danger. And while risks can be mitigated by safety technology and preparation, they can’t be entirely eliminated or faked, either—not when you’re in the flesh-and-blood business of designing action sequences featuring actual humans risking their actual lives. Every performer in the studio has had injuries, some serious: ruptured Achilles tendons, torn shoulder ligaments, broken bones, and a near-endless litany of bruises, sprains, and fat lips. Two-decade veteran Leitch is practically bionic.

“Safety is the number-one priority in stunt work,” says 39-year-old performer and director Shahaub Roudbari. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars for every moment. People’s lives are on the line.” Plus, he says, stunt performers are responsible for the safety of the actors they work with as well. “If I dent Jason Momoa’s nose,” he says, “that’s a big problem.”

Even when things go well, the stress of stunt work can get pretty gnarly. The performers at 87North are usually geeking out so hard over one another’s accomplishments that they don’t talk about it, but stress in the profession is ever-present. “For Bullet Train, I did a 90-foot fall off a building, landing on top of a car with Brad Pitt in it,” says Roudbari. “I’m standing on the ledge, the wires are pulling me, and it’s an exercise in fear.” In addition, he says, “I had to do an acting scene before the fall. David’s getting me all emotional for it, but meanwhile I’m thinking, If I fall out too far, I’ll swing and slam into the building.”

3, 2, 1, Action. He nailed the stunt. Scattered applause. Cut. Check the gate. Move on. Terrifying though it may be, it’s just the type of opportunity that stuntmen hunger for—the more lethal, the better—as big stunts are a chance to distinguish yourself in a competitive field. On the set of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F last year, 29-year-old Didi Alaoui was asked to jump out of a speeding truck, land, roll, and—incidentally—avoid getting run over by the car coming up fast behind him. It’s the kind of blink-and-you-miss-it moment of chaos that happens dozens of times in any action movie, but the stakes were high: Land wrong and you twist an ankle. Roll off course and you break a bone. Hit the car and . . . well . . . don’t hit the car.

Shahaub Roudbari is a wushu expert known for fight coordination on projects like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and WandaVision.

But Alaoui, a parkour champion, didn’t hesitate. “There was this big Uh-oh, here we go. This is real. And the truck starts swerving around, I fall inside the truck, and I drop off, straight onto concrete.” He hit his mark, missed the pursuing vehicle, and jumped to his feet. Thumbs-up. “I think that was good,” he says. “I’m proud of that.”

Perhaps the most striking revelation about the performers at 87North is that, despite their penchant for risking life and limb and their daily immersion in violence and bloodshed, the masculinity on display is refreshingly supportive. They’re folks you’d want in a foxhole with you, not only because of their evident skills in a fight but because they’d be good company. Ask Fitzgerald about Shakespeare and he’ll talk till last call. Ditto for Roudbari and Lord of the Rings and acrobat Remi Bakkar and Dune.

It may be a top-down effect. Leitch and McCormick, the power couple in the C-suite, are not icy, hands-off execs. “We like to mentor,” Leitch says. “Mentorship often leads to working relationships. So we want to keep surrounding ourselves with good people that speak our language.” McCormick and Leitch’s latest latest, With Love, directed by former stunt performer Jonathan Eusebio, just finished shooting. Another goal: push the industry to recognize the singular contribution of stunt coordinators with an Oscar for stunt design. To clear his head, Leitch can often be found in the early mornings working out on the weights that surround the central area where the pews used to be. “He’ll be working out by himself with headphones on,” says Jeff Kemperman, a production assistant at 87North. But if there’s a class going on or someone working on fight choreography, he says, Leitch can’t help himself: “He’ll pull off the headphones, walk over, and say, Try this, what about this? He just loves this stuff so much.” You can’t fake that.

This article appears in the July-August 2024 issue of Men’s Health.

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