Ryan Gosling credits “an amazing stunt” team for helping get him ready to film “The Gray Man,” a big-budget, action-packed espionage thriller from Netflix in which he stars as highly skilled CIA operative Sierra Six, better known simply as “Six.”
“There was, as you can imagine, a lot of training for the film,” Gosling says during the recent virtual global news conference in advance of the movie’s limited theatrical release last week. “At first, they sort of went through all these different styles of martial arts and sort of tried to curate it for you and the character.”
Gosling also credited Craig “Chili” Palmer, an adviser on the production and a former member of the U.S. military’s Delta Force, for tactical advice — which included ideas such as tying your shoelaces to a doorknob before you go to sleep to ensure you’ll know when someone enters the room.
“I just tried to join myself at the hip with him,” Gosling says.
All of that may not have been enough.
“I would go back to Pre-Movie Me and tell him to work on his cardio. I didn’t expect all that Prague running,” says the star of movies including “Blue Valentine,” “La La Land” and “Blade Runner 2049,” referring to the extended action-filled centerpiece sequence in “The Gray Man.”
Set to make its debut on the streaming platform this week, the film is the latest from Joe and Anthony Russo, the filmmaking brothers who grew up in northeast Ohio and whose directing credits include a number of Marvel Cinematic Universe entries, including the second-highest-grossing film of all time, 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” Their previous effort was “Cherry,” a drama starring MCU regular Tom Holland (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) that debuted last year on Apple TV+.
For the primary villain of “The Gray Man” — morally bankrupt former CIA man Lloyd Hansen, who’s chock full of personality — the Russos turned to Captain America himself, Chris Evans, whom they directed in “Endgame” and three earlier big-budget MCU affairs.
“Playing a villain is always a little more fun,” Evans says. “You have a little bit more freedom — you get a lot more jokes — but working with the Russos is what gives you that sense of trust and freedom. You know, when you trust the filmmakers, you’re more willing to take risks, and certainly a character like this takes risks.”
Another villain — Denny Carmichael, the CIA higher-up who turns on Six and enlists the services of Lloyd despite the inherent risks — is portrayed by Rege-Jean Page, a former “Bridgerton” favorite.
“I wanted to give him a bit of depth,” says the British actor. “I wanted there to be something kind of interesting and blue-collar in his background. Something East Coast, something aspirational into why he’s pushing himself so hard — why this enfant terrible has risen quite so high so quickly and pushed so hard.”
“The Gray Man” also stars Ana de Armas, who performed alongside Evans in 2019’s “Knives Out,” and gets supporting work from prominent actors Jessica Henwick (“The Matrix Resurrections”), Billy Bob Thornton (“Goliath”) and Alfre Woodard (“See”).
It also features Dhanush, who, by his count, has performed in about 50 movies over two-plus decades in the Indian film industry.
“Growing up watching Hollywood films and to be in one is like really… yeah, it’s nice,” he says with a laugh. “I’m very thankful to the Russos for finding me and casting me, and it’s just amazing.”
Collaboration was one key topic of the moderated gathering, Goslin citing a process used by the Russos that he’d never before experienced.
“At the beginning of the film,” he says, “we sat with all of the department heads, and they put the script up on a big screen, and everybody, you know, sort of starts talking about it as they work through it. And at first, it makes it not precious and very collaborative. And also, it really gets you on the same page, literally. You know what movie you’re making.”
“It’s really important to us to work with the cast on the scripts,” Joe Russo says. “We want them to have emotional ownership over the characters. And everyone here is a great storyteller, as well as an incredible actor. They all have an amazing wealth of experience.
“We encourage all of our collaborators to bring that to the table. You know, the script, for us — Anthony and I like to prepare so that we can throw things away. That’s a really, it’s an old adage in filmmaking, so we’re always available to what’s happening in the moment.”
Without getting into who exactly survives the ordeal of “The Gray Man,” the Russos don’t exactly rule out some type of expansion of this world.
“Look,” Anthony Russo says, “part of our motivation to assemble a cast like this, an amazing cast like this who can embody so many interesting characters, was the hope of creating sort of a universe that you wanted to follow all of them, either forward or backward from this moment in time that we caught in the first movie.”
Now, whether anything in the future will match the aforementioned Prague sequence is another matter.
“We needed a large section of the city to pull that off,” Anthony says. “That sequence starts in a major city square, and it continues through a chase throughout the city, so it was very complex.
“We’re grateful to everyone in Prague. Prague’s an amazing filmmaking center — they have amazing crew there, and the people are very supportive of filmmaking. You can only pull something that complex off at a place like Prague.”
The sequence, involving myriad moving pieces and in which bullets fly and things go boom, recalls a sequence from a previous Russos joint.
“We did this with (2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”) — we shut down a freeway,” Joe says. “We went back to Cleveland, our hometown, to shoot the movie, and everyone was very happy. And then we shut down the freeway for two weeks and …”
“I was going to say,” adds Anthony, “they weren’t that happy.”
“And then they weren’t that happy,” Joe agrees. “It was very short-lived.
“I don’t think we can go back to Prague or Cleveland.”
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