The 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards took place last night, and things remain mostly on the same track as they have been. Demi Moore, Zoe Saldaña, and Kieran Culkin continue to be the Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor names to beat with their wins, but then along came Timothée Chalamet, whose leading role in A Complete Unknown managed to stand up Daniel Craig, Colman Domingo, Ralph Fiennes, and the favorite Adrien Brody.
It was one of the biggest upsets of the night, but there was another, far more pleasant upset was revealed way back on the red carpet. That one belonged to The Fall Guy, which nabbed the Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture honor.
It was no easy category, either. The Fall Guy was competing against Dune: Part Two, Wicked, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Gladiator II, all of which had beefy box office totals, warm-to-raving critical sentiment, and a cultural impact. The Fall Guy, by contrast, lost Universal Pictures about $50 million dollars and was hardly a blip on most radars. By all appearances, The Fall Guy was the minnow here.
Except, it wasn’t, because there’s no just world in which a film like The Fall Guy wouldn’t have walked away with such an award. Gladiator II and Dune: Part Two may have had gargantuan action set pieces, Deadpool & Wolverine may have had some electrifying superhero combat, and Wicked may have been richly and sparklingly choreographed throughout, but The Fall Guy made a point — both within the film’s story and behind the scenes — to express its love and gratitude for Hollywood stunt workers.
For those of you not in the know, The Fall Guy stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a former Hollywood stuntman forced into early retirement after an accident, and who’s recruited by a film producer (Hannah Waddingham) to investigate the case of missing movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Driven by his love for director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) — whose first film is supposed to be starring Ryder — Colt channels his talents for flipping, tumbling, and taking a punch into a campaign worthy of a real-life action hero.
It’s a genius premise that may not be entirely organic (the film is loosely based on the 1980s television series of the same name), but is nevertheless realized brilliantly. If you needed a real-life action hero to solve some sort of problem, you would call a stuntman — who literally does all the on-set action hero stuff every day — long before you call an actor, and in Colt’s case, he’s doing it only because he wants Jody to be able to make her movie. That right there is the unadulterated ethos of the tragically unrecognized stunt worker — Hollywood films quite simply couldn’t get made without them, and yet they receive such paltry regard in the business. Still, they persevere.
And it’s not just the fact that Gosling plays a stuntman, either. Gosling’s real-life stunt double, Justin Eaton, has a small role in the film, and the in-story stunt team (equipped with stunt apparatuses displayed with the logo of the film’s actual production company, 87North Productions) plays an important role in making sure Colt’s mission succeeds.
All this, and the film is a joyful watch to boot. Indeed, having gone the full nine yards to craft such a rollicking love letter to Hollywood stunt workers (to say nothing of having nailed the actual stunt work as deftly as its competition), seeing The Fall Guy get recognized this way is truly delightful, and will hopefully pave the way for more prominent stunt worker recognition in the industry.
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