Have you heard that The Fall Guy is a love letter to Hollywood, stunt performers, and the elusiveness of an incredible Act 3? Because that’s all that people who saw The Fall Guy can talk about. It’s not just hyperbole, though: The Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt vehicle does feature a stuntman as its main character. And yet, the action comedy’s devotion to the stunt community extends as far as its promotional campaign: At The Fall Guy’s Los Angeles premiere, stunt performers landed motorbike tricks, staged a high fall, and broke out into choreographed fights on the red carpet. And considering that the movie is directed by former stuntman David Leitch, that’s probably not a coincidence. Still, at the end of the movie, when B footage showcases the action comedy’s real behind-the-scenes stunts, the The Fall Guy shows its hand: It wants to give stunt performers their due. Since its release, the movie has even kickstarted a sleeper campaign to reward stunt performing at the Oscars. 

That said, what better way to celebrate this very thrilling, meta-tastic movie than by running down its best (and very real) stunts?

1. The spinning garbage bin.

Gosling did some of his own stunts in The Fall Guy, unlike the movie’s egomaniacal Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Speaking of which, one of Gosling’s most hair-raising stunts occurs about midway through the movie when his stuntman character Colt Seavers takes on a grunt inside a dump truck. As the truck’s garbage container spins wildly around with Gosling and the goon tussling inside, the scene manages to reference multiple Indiana Jones movies while giving Gosling an iconic action moment. Once Gosling surfs behind the truck on a shovel, it’s all over.

2. The record-breaking barrel rolls.

The Fall Guy is a movie within a movie, and the dialogue often goes meta. For instance, when Colt Seavers does eight-and-a-half barrel rolls on one of the film’s fictional sets, a character immediately calls out the feat as record-breaking–and not just within the context of the movie. Previously, the world record for barrel rolls in a movie (a.k.a. those flippy things that cars do when they get blown up) had been held by Casino Royale. Still, The Fall Guy pulled it off. All David Leitch had to do was calculate the density of his on-set sand, then rig a Jeep Cherokee with an air cannon and send the driver down a soggy beach at 80 mph. Easy peasy!

3. The epic Act 3 canyon jump.

Emily Blunt’s character Jody Moreno spends much of the movie bemoaning the difficulty of writing the third act of her own movie. However, The Fall Guy’s director knows exactly how to end a romantic action comedy–by packing in as much action as possible. In one thrilling end-game moment, Colt Seavers catapults himself and Tom Ryder across a gaping canyon by speeding up a ramp at 75 mph. The jump–225 feet long in real life—was the result of endless trial runs on practice sets. Of course, in the movie, Colt Seavers does it one take.

4. The helicopter fall.

Considering the title of this movie, it’s surprising that there aren’t more daring falls from helicopters in it. But as it turns out, there’s just one–and it’s epic. To film the moment in which Colt Seavers falls onto an airbag from a moving helicopter, stunt performer Tony Brown had to take coaching from his own dad, the legendary performer Bob Brown. The elder Brown even brought the very airbag he used when he broke the world record for highest stunt fall in 2002, where he dropped 20 stories from a skyscraper window while engulfed in flames. Let’s see Tom Cruise do that.

5. The explosive speedboat crash.

It’s tempting to think that all movie scenes involving exploding cars and boats in 2024 are CGI. But sadly, for the stunt performers operating Gosling’s boat in the movie’s Sydney chase scene, the scene was created with practical effects. At least the boat operators, who were hidden, had good backup: Gosling obtained a boating license for the scene just in case he ever needed to take the wheel. In the end, the stunt team managed to pull off an 80-foot jump from a 24-foot-long ramp into a fiery explosion. And they did it all while driving the boat backwards!