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English actor Daniel Kaluuya, wearing a towelling dressing gown over woollen trousers and a T-shirt soaked in blood, stands briefly at the top of a staircase before tumbling down its 25 steps and coming to a stop at the bottom with a loud thump and a groan. And then he immediately gets up and does it again.
Only it’s not really Daniel Kaluuya, it’s one of the 13 men who have been hired to double for him on the set of Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, the second feature from former YouTube prodigy Michael Shanks, who made the body horror rom-com Together with real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco.
The man on the stairs is in fact Elliot Joseph, an English-born stunt performer who moved to Australia in 2014 as a chef, finding work on film sets. And it was while working on one in 2018, the Australian-Chinese co-production The Whistleblower, that he got his big break in a second career in which avoiding breaks (arms, legs, you name it) is very much the aim.
“One of the guys came up to me and said, ‘are you able to ride a motorbike because you have a look and we could use you’,” Joseph recalls.
What made him stand out was his skin colour. At the time, he says, “there was nobody in the whole of Australia [doing stunt work] that looked like me.
“You’d go through the stunt registry and it was all fair skin. It was crazy.”
As it happened, he couldn’t ride a motorbike. But he was young and strong and fit, with a background in martial arts, so there was plenty of stuff he could do. In the end, he worked on the film for four or five months, and he’s been working as a stunt performer more or less ever since.
By the time production started on Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, things had moved on – but only a little. “There’s now more than just me as a black stunt performer,” says Joseph. “There’s, like, three of us.”
That number will soon increase substantially as a direct result of the film now being shot at Docklands Studios Melbourne, which required lots of people who could feasibly pass – at a distance, at least – for the English actor who starred in Get Out and won the best supporting actor Oscar for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021.
Among them are Loang Rout and Buomkuoth (aka BK) Gatluak, neither of whom had been anywhere near a film set until a few months ago, but both of whom now envisage a career in stunts.
“It came out of nowhere,” says Rout. “My basketball coach gave me a call, ‘Hey I just got this random email, they’re looking for some guys for a film – would you be interested?’ And I was like, yeah, sure.”
On his first day on set, Rout – whose day job is as a carpenter – found himself strapped into a harness and sitting atop a human tower, eight or nine bodies up. “At first it was terrifying,” he says. “But I got used to it pretty quickly.”
For Gatluak, who runs a basketball centre in the city’s south-east, the approach similarly came out of the blue. But that was nothing compared to the first day on set.
“We got briefed on what we were doing, and when we were told we would be working with Daniel Kaluuya, we were pretty shocked,” he says. “He’s a pretty big Hollywood star.”
Both men are of South Sudanese background, and the opportunity they’ve been presented with – including a pathway to becoming fully certified as stunt performers – is, says Gatluak, “a great story. Our community have a pretty bad name in the media, with all the violence and crime, so if we can be the first two to open this door for the rest of our community, there’s no telling where it could lead.”
Philli Anderson knows exactly how it feels to be a trailblazer. When the former gymnast, who entered the stunt world 20 years ago, made the transition to stunt coordinator in 2021 she was the only female in the role in the country. “Now we’ve got five,” she says. “But two of them work permanently overseas.”
The shift underway in the world of stunts owes much to the influx of foreign production. “All the time we get asked for diversity,” says Anderson. “When Americans come here, the expectation is there’s diversity. But now, even on Australian shows, you can’t have all-white streets. We have to have diversity.”
VicScreen boss Caroline Pitcher says her agency “is committed to building a screen industry that truly reflects the diversity of our community both on screen and behind the scenes. It is fantastic to see Victorians from the African-Australian community employed as stand-ins and doubles and provided with training and professional development opportunities to build long-term careers.”
More diverse casting means more diverse doubles and stunt performers, which in turn means the future could be bright for Rout and Gatluak and those who follow them. But, Philli Anderson notes, “their colour alone is not enough to make them good stuntmen. We have to make sure we teach them right.”
That’s not just about how to fall without doing yourself an injury. It’s about how to behave on set, how to read a call sheet, how to carry yourself in the long periods when you’re not needed for a scene.
Igho Diegbe, who is working as both a stunt double and an acting double for Kaluuya on the film, echoes that view. He’s nearly qualified as a stunt performer (he has worked intermittently since 2018), and says “the whole process isn’t just about doing the training. It’s about being on set and getting experience points, to make sure you’re not only trained, you’re able to perform.
“The stunt isn’t just doing that fall,” he continues. “It’s the performative bit as well – making the fall look dramatic.”
If he and his newbie colleagues nail it, he says, it’s more than just a job well done.
“By virtue of our involvement in this, and the increased exposure it brings, people see it and they go, ‘Oh, wow, they did a great job’. And then we can hopefully start to develop the younger generation to be interested in this.”
And thanks to the peculiar demands of Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, a new wave of Aussie stunties is already on a roll.
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