Hollywood’s studio system keeps a pretty tight rein on what any actor involved in a major project says to the press. That’s why most of the interviews you’ll read with major stars are, to put it bluntly, downright boring. It’s the lesser knowns who often have the most interesting things to say, whether because they just don’t know any better or because they have less lose. Either way, somewhere a studio suit cringes every time someone interviews stuntman number two or the third extra from the left in a major, upcoming picture.
For instance Movieline interviewed stuntman Garrett Warren. He’s Mickey Rourke’s stunt double on Iron Man, he did stunt work in Avatar, and he has a job on Tin Tin. What he probably didn’t know when he started talking to Movieline was that their only reason for interviewing him was to get him to slip them some savory, probably shouldn’t be talked about information on one of the high-profile projects he’s been working on. Ok, I’m actually only assuming that was their motive, but read the interview for yourself and see if you see what I see. Maybe I’m just a cynical bastard, but to me it reads as though they played him like a fiddle.
The result of that fiddling is a few interesting, highly spoilerific Iron Man 2 tidbits. You can read the full interview over there, but here’s a quick breakdown of the biggest, most noteworthy items sucked out of him:
The kangaroo hide whips used by Mickey Rourke and Garret while filming Whiplash’s scenes will be digitally replaced with other “types” of whips. As you’ve probably seen from the trailers, they’re “super whips” and they have “an awful lot of power.At some point in the film you’ll see Whiplash use his whips to cut through cars and in Garrett’s words “they can do an awful lot of damage”. It’s not just “whip-cracks and grabbing people”. At some point he’ll lay “waste to an awful lot of vehicles and street pieces and other things”.At some point Whiplash will get hit by a car, and be slammed into a fence.The drawings of the finished Whiplash suite we saw here seem to be at least somewhat accurate. Garrett describes the finished Whiplash suit this way: “It covers the whole body in metal rods, but you are shirtless [underneath].”
