Broken bones, no glory: As Ryan Gosling takes on The Fall Guy, when will stunt performers get their due?

From Buster Keaton to Brad Pitt, Hollywood heroes and their stand-in stuntmen have been risking life and limb (quite literally) to keep us on the edge of our seats for decades. With Gosling starring as a gnarled stuntman in next year’s ‘The Fall Guy’, Geoffrey Macnab hails the hard men you’ve never heard of

Clockwise from top left: ‘GoldenEye’; Ryan Gosling on the set of ‘The Fall Guy’; Tom Cruise on Burj Khalifa in ‘Mission Impossible 4’; Lee Majors in TV show ‘The Fall Guy’; Chow Yun-fat in ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’; Michelle Rodriguez in ‘Fast & Furious’ (Getty/Shutterstock)

For most of cinema history, stunt artists have languished in obscurity. They are dragged under stagecoaches and trampled by horses in old John Ford westerns; they drive chariots round the Colosseum, or jump out of trains and helicopters. Few watching actually know their names. A-listers who’ve been sitting safely in their trailers invariably usurp their glory. That is a state of affairs actor Ryan Gosling seems determined to change. “In most films, the actors get all the credit, but the stunt performers do all the work,” he said earlier this summer. “That ends today.”

Gosling was talking up his next film, The Fall Guy, at industry event CinemaCon. In the action thriller, which hits cinemas in March, he plays a gnarled and ageing stuntman brought in to work on a movie whose main star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has just gone missing. Emily Blunt co-stars as the film’s director – and Gosling’s ex.

So are stunt artists finally about to receive some long-overdue recognition from the public and their peers? For this to happen, though, Hollywood will have to come clean about the limitations of most movie stars. For years, we’ve been drip-fed stories of big names boasting about performing their own stunts. But unless they’re Tom Cruise or Jackie Chan, they almost certainly didn’t. Gosling is one of the few A-listers who’s always acknowledged the help he receives from professional stunt artists.