Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt movie The Fall Guy breaks Guinness World Record

In a case of life imitating art imitating life, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s upcoming movie, The Fall Guy, has claimed a world record for most “cannon rolls” in a stunt car.

According to Guinness, the record now belongs to stuntman Logan Holladay, who performed the eye-popping sequence on a Sydney beach, where the movie was shot in 2022.

A “cannon roll” is where a car flips over in several rotations. Holladay and The Fall Guy production managed eight-and-a-half rolls. The previous record was held by the 2006 James Bond movie Casino Royale, which did seven “cannon rolls”.

The awarding of the record plays perfectly into The Fall Guy’s promotional tour, which kicked off this week two days after the Oscars. The movie premiered this week at SXSW, and the next day during a Los Angeles screening, Gosling and director David Leitch presented the record to Holladay on stage.

Inspired by the 1980s TV show, The Fall Guy is about Colt, a movie stuntman who is dragooned into a mystery when the star he’s doubling for disappears.

Gosling plays the stuntman, Blunt the film’s director with whom Colt used to have a relationship, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the famous star and Hannah Waddingham as the fictional movie-within-the-movie’s producer. Winston Duke and Stephanie Hsu are also in the cast.

The Fall Guy shut down several iconic Sydney landmarks including the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House during its production in late-2022 and early-2023.

Director Leitch is a former stuntman who used to double for the likes of Brad Pitt before he crossed to behind the camera on the likes of John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train.

On stage at the LA screening, Leitch told the audience that The Fall Guy is “not just a celebration of action films but a celebration of the stunts and stunt people behind the scenes, the unsung heroes who really do risk their lives to bring you some of the most memorable sequences in film, and the hard work they put in and the joy they have doing it”.

Gosling said he has had a stunt person double him since he was teen actor on Young Hercules, and paid tribute to the profession.

“There’s this accepted dynamic where they come on set, they do all the cool stuff, they risk everything, and then they disappear into the shadows and we all pretend as if they were never there. Everyone else on set gets credit, but there’s kind of unspoken understanding that they won’t. That ends today!”

Stunt people have been lobbying the Oscars for a category recognising their craft but has so far been rebuffed. As something of a consolation prize, Gosling and Blunt presented a package at this year’s ceremony drawing attention to stunt work.

The Screen Actors Guild has two categories for stunt people at its awards, one for TV shows and another for movies. The most recent winners were the teams from The Last of Us and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.