The Fall Guy’s Director Had a Nasty Stunt Experience — Because of Brad Pitt

Summary:

• Before making his way to directing, David Leitch was mostly known as a stunt actor that worked with numerous Hollywood stars on set.
• While performing a stunt for Brad Pitt’s 2001 movie, Leitch provoked an accident, the reason for which, according to him, is connected to Pitt himself.
• After the director’s fiasco Leitch still got to work with Brad Pitt on his multiple films, including Fight Club and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

David Leitch may now be known as a director who’s on his career path got to work with the biggest Hollywood stars starting from John Wick ’s Keanu Reeves and ending with his most recent film The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

As Leitch’s latest movie demonstrates the challenges that the stunt actor has to face in his work, it seems like most of the plot the director took straight from his own experience.

Before finding his own way of directing, Leitch also started his career as a stunt actor — and he even has a funny, yet totally disastrous story about his dismissal from the set which, to everyone’s surprise, involves Brad Pitt.

While promoting The Fall Guy, the director revealed that his personal fiasco had happened back in 2000 when he was working on the set of The Mexican starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Leitch was supposed to be one of Pitt’s stunt actors — but the former was apparently quite new in the industry and working with big stars got to be very stressful, to say the least.

Thus, the director confessed that he was so starstruck with Brad Pitt that couldn’t even stop thinking about it and eventually crashed one car into another depriving the crew of the only vehicles that were on the set.

According to Leitch, the stunt coordinator told him that he should’ve blamed the car’s dead brakes, but the then stunt performer preferred to stay honest about the real reason for the failure.

Despite quite an awkward start of their work together, Leitch and Pitt have over the years collaborated numerous times — Leitch continued his stunt work in some of Pitt’s films like Fight Club, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Troy, Spy Game and Ocean Eleven. Brad Pitt, in his turn, appeared in Leitch’s 2022 film Bullet Train in the leading role.