Ryan Gosling set to star in dra­ma about the life of a stuntman

In the years since he broke out as the co-direc­tor of megahit John Wick, action-vet­er­an-turned-film­mak­er David Leitch has been keep­ing busy. He returned to sil­ver screens in 2017 with the hard-hit­ting Char­l­ize Theron vehi­cle Atom­ic Blonde, then cranked out a sequel to Dead­pool in 2018, and then spun off the Fast ​‘n’ Furi­ous fran­chise into Hobbs and Shaw in 2019. He won’t con­tin­ue his back-to-back-to-back streak in 2020, but the good news is he’s already mak­ing plans for his future in features.

Dead­line has the news that Leitch will direct a dra­ma about the lives of stunt­men, a top­ic with which he’s all too famil­iar, for his next project. The deal gets even sweet­er – Ryan Gosling has already signed on for the lead.

Both men will bring a good­ly mea­sure of exper­tise to this lit­tle-explored milieu; Leitch cut his teeth as an inde­struc­tible stand-in per­former for explo­sions, car crash­es, and any oth­er scenes too haz­ardous for the pre­cious actors to do per­son­al­ly. Gosling, to his cred­it, has por­trayed stunt rid­ers in both The Place Beyond the Pines and Dri­ve. One more so than the oth­er, they have a feel for the work and the sort of peo­ple who do it.

Some­what less encour­ag­ing is the news that the film will be script­ed by Drew Pearce, known best for script­ing Iron Man 3, and for direct­ing the thor­ough­ly under­whelm­ing Wick-lite crime thriller Hotel Artemis. (He also wrote Hobbs and Shaw, cement­ing his link to Leitch.) The des­ig­na­tion of this film as a dra­ma also rais­es an eye­brow, con­sid­er­ing that both Pearce and Leitch have back­grounds in big-bud­get action spec­ta­cle that hasn’t always pri­or­i­tized char­ac­ter work.

Per­haps the green light for this film comes from a desire to pig­gy­back on the recent suc­cess of Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, in which Brad Pitt deliv­ered an Oscar-win­ning per­for­mance as stunt pro Cliff Booth. It’s always been a roman­ti­cized pro­fes­sion – the per­fect com­bo of tough-guy mas­culin­i­ty and artis­tic sen­si­tiv­i­ty – but if things keep going like this, the hum­ble stunt­man may soon join the cow­boy in the canon of the cin­e­mat­ic imagination.