How Ryan Gosling and director David Leitch advocated for a new stunt category at the Oscars

Stunts have been an insanely difficult and dangerous part of filmmaking since the dawn of cinema, from the silent film star Buster Keaton all the way through to today. When making the stunt-centric action comedy film The Fall Guy last year, Ryan Gosling played a stuntman and advocated for the work of stunt professionals to be better recognized in the industry. As of last week, The Academy Awards are listening, but not just to Gosling.

In a press release, the Academy shared “the creation of an annual competitive Academy Award® for Achievement in Stunt Design, beginning with the 100th Academy Awards® [in 2028] for films released in 2027.” Stunt professionals are an integral part of making a film work, and as the Academy shared, “More than 100 stunt professionals are members of the Academy’s Production and Technology Branch.”

One of the people leading the charge for this recognition, something stunt professionals have urged for decades, was The Fall Guy director David Leitch, according to Variety. Leitch had started as a stunt professional and, in addition to being a director, co-runs 87North, a production company dedicated to action films, with producer Kelly McCormick. With several other advocates from the field, he made presentations to the Board of Governors within the Academy for a stunt award.

The Stunt Design category starting at the 2028 Oscars will focus on a stunt department’s work on a film, as opposed to the achievements of just one person. This was a decision praised by stunt professional Chad Stahelski, because “our department is one of the most collaborative and intricate of all the departments,” as Stahelski told Variety. Indeed, it was part of Leitch’s advocacy that a department be recognized because so many people come together to make sure the stunts are designed and run according to plan. Even Eva Mendes, Gosling's partner, was excited about the news and posted about it on Instagram:

Leitch and Gosling advocated for stunt professionals’ recognition throughout The Fall Guy’s marketing campaign, with Gosling regularly appearing on the red carpet with stunt professionals and promoting them in the press. “All of us really wanted this film to be not just a celebration of action films but a celebration of stunt people behind the scenes,” Leitch said at a special film screening in 2024. Stunts have achieved some recognition--the Screen Actors Guild Awards has two stunt categories that are still relatively new, having only begun in 2007: “Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture” and “Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series.” But the Oscar is next level.

The Fall Guy didn’t disappoint onscreen, either. Indeed, one of Gosling’s eight stunt-doubles, Logan Holladay, achieved a Guinness World Record for his work on the film, performing eight-and-a-half cannon rolls–“a classic stunt dating back to the early days of cinema, involving fitting a cannon-like apparatus beneath a car that shoots toward the ground,” according to the Guinness World Records. Holladay explains how it works below:

It was also Leitch’s doing that The Fall Guy officially became the first movie to ever officially include a ‘Stunt Designer’ credit (for longtime stunt choreographer Chris O'Hara), as agreed to by both SAG-AFTRA and the DGA,” according to an article in Men’s Health during that 2024 press run.

"So many of these sequences that are a part of cinema history, and sometimes what people like most about a film or remember most, were designed not by the filmmakers but by the stunt designers and the performers," Gosling told Men’s Health in time for The Fall Guy’s release. "It’s also impossible to separate the history of cinema with the history of action. It’s a huge part of why people fell in love with cinema in the first place."

Now that stunt design teams will be able to receive Oscars beginning in 2028, that recognition will only continue.