Warning: SPOILERS ahead for The Fall Guy's ending! Don't say we didn't warn ya.
The Fall Guy is a big, action-packed, star-studded, crowd-pleasing blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling, who also served as producer alongside director David Leitch. This is the perfect recipe for silly and surprising Hollywood cameos, and the flick comes through beautifully on that front. When I caught up with David Leitch for an interview in support of the movie, he told me how a major cameo came to fruition, and the story is rather heartwarming.
As you probably know if you’ve made it this far, The Fall Guy is a meta movie-making adventure with a plot largely surrounding the film-within-a-film, an action epic starring Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Tom Ryder. Ryder is replaced as lead at the end of The Fall Guy, and when it’s finally revealed who will be stepping in via the film’s trailer, we see that it’s none other than Jason Momoa, who is playing himself.
David Leitch admitted to me that Jason Momoa wasn’t the first person he reached out to, but he didn’t want to reveal the other folks that were in consideration. As it turns out, getting an actor to pop over to Australia for one day isn’t an easy task, but luckily, Leitch and Momoa are old friends. The director explained:
I reached out to a lot of people and friends, and it really came down to, we were shooting in Australia and it was hard to ask people to come down for a one day cameo. But what was great with Jason is he was in New Zealand shooting his television show, and when I reached out to Jason, he's like, ‘Dude, I’ll on hop on a plane right now. It’ll be fun. Let's chew it up.’
And “chew it up” they did! The whole reveal is pretty hilarious, especially because it calls back to an earlier joke regarding his name’s proper spelling: Momoa or Mamoa? Seeing his name appear in titles while he kills aliens dressed as a space cowboy was icing on the cake. The project David Leitch was referring to is most likely Minecraft, which just wrapped shooting in New Zealand. Momoa even brought Josh Brolin over to the Middle Earth filming area with the promise of motorcycles in abundance, so it seems his temporary stint as a Kiwi really worked out for everyone.
This Fall Guy cameo was dependent upon finding someone who is known for action films the way that Tom Ryder is. While Minecraft looks to be more of an absurdist comedy in the style of the film’s director Jared Hess, the world knows Jason Momoa best from badass roles like Aquaman and Game of Thrones’ Khal Drogo. More importantly, he and David Leitch met on an action film, 2011’s Conan the Barbarian.
They’ve been friends ever since, and the way Leitch described how this cameo came to be makes the reunion sound rather sweet:
He flew in that morning, we shot all day, and he flew back that night so he could shoot the next day on his TV show that he was producing. He's a good friend and we go way back to his Conan. His first Conan movie.
This isn’t the only cameo in The Fall Guy, not by a longshot, but I’ll stop the spoilers there. If you’re a fan of cinema, especially blockbusters, you have every reason to see this film. It's so extra that they even broke a Guinness World Record for stunts and had Ryan Gosling participate in a live stunt show at Universal Studios. How’s that for clever marketing?
As for Jason Momoa, his future as Aquaman is uncertain, but at least we can see him in The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, in theaters now! Fingers crossed it ends up being one of the biggest new movies of 2024.
