Many film fans love a good action movie, and when Extraction released on Netflix in April 2020, people went crazy for the story centered on Chris Hemsworth’s black ops mercenary trying to rescue the kidnapped son of an Indian drug lord, after he finds he’s been double-crossed. As expected, the movie had several scenes filled with amazing fight sequences and some even more amazing stunt work, and now that Extraction has won some awards for those stunts, Hemsworth has shared a wild video from the set.
Unless you’re someone who enjoys watching stunts so much that you regularly seek out extra footage and information on how stunt performers prepare for and then do such frequently dangerous work, you probably don’t see much of the behind-the-scenes effort that goes into filming various fights, falls, and death-defying flips. A lot goes into making all of that look realistic while keeping people safe, and with Sam Hargrave’s feature directorial debut having now won three Taurus World Stunt Awards, star Chris Hemsworth has taken to Instagram to congratulate the team who made it all possible. Take a look!
WOW. Right? I mean, just that first view of two very real people falling off a balcony onto an awning and bouncing off a truck, looking quite a bit like life-sized rag dolls, is enough to make anyone wonder how it’s possible to do such a thing and not get hurt. No wonder there were people other than Hemsworth on the other side of the camera filming the action on their phones.
Of course, we can also see that Hemsworth himself got in on the action. We knew that he’d performed many of his own stunts, and this video shows off some of that intense work, including what looks to be him practicing his fall off of the bridge that wrapped the action for his character, Tyler Rake.
The Thor actor talked about filming these Extraction action scenes shortly after the movie debuted and became a near instant hit, and discussed how the three month shoot included weeks of rehearsals beforehand. During filming, they also rehearsed the next day’s fight scenes, even if they’d already spent that day filming another of the movie’s hard-charging action sequences. Hemsworth noted that the entire production was “basically kind of running and sprinting and fighting the whole time,” but did also say he found the experience “exhausting but rewarding,” because of the results they were able to achieve. And, clearly, all of the hard work paid off.
Not only did the film just win Best Fight, Hardest Hit, and Best Stunt Coordination, but Netflix reported just how well the movie did with fans, who watched to the tune of 99 million households in the first four weeks of its release. This means that a sequel was given the go-ahead pretty quickly, and, luckily, from what Hemsworth says, they expect to begin filming on Extraction 2 soon, and with much bigger stunt plans than in the first film.
Right now, all we really know about Extraction 2 is that Hargrave will return to direct and Chris Hemsworth will be back as Tyler (hopefully after the wounded mercenary has some time to recover), but we can’t wait to see where the action will take us the second time around.
