Ryan Gosling felt compelled to do as much stunt work as possible while shooting The Nice Guys because his double was recovering from stab wound surgery.
The movie hunk got serious about the action scenes in the film when he discovered Brett Praed was nursing a bayonette injury from Brad Pitt's war movie Fury.
"He had just come from Fury and he was doing a scene where all these bodies were laying in a field and one of his other stunt guy friends was going around bayonetting dummies through the chest," Ryan told WENN. "His friend mistook him for a dummy and stuck a bayonette through his chest and impaled him!
"Two weeks later he was on our set ready to get down, so I had to do a lot of those stunts just because, what kind of person would I be if I asked Brett to do those things?"
And he had a lot of support from his all-action co-star Russell Crowe, who was always up for doing his own stunt work in the film.
"He's done so many stunts that as soon as the read-through ended I saw Russell sketching something and it was almost a blueprint for a hot tub!" he added. "He was immediately talking to (director) Shane (Black) about how the dimensions of a hot tub wouldn't allow for the scene that had been written.
"He immediately went into stunt mode."
But Russell, 52, has confessed he's not quite as willing to jump into stunt work as he was at the beginning of his career because he fears he won't be able to bounce back as quickly from an injury.
"The older I get the less that's just physically possible," he tells WENN. "I remember when I was a young fella doing all of my stunts and the occasional older actor would go, 'Why are you doing it? Why don't you let the stunt guys do it?'
"Now that I'm an older guy, I'm like, that was a piece of kindness and wisdom that had just missed me at the time, because you do start stacking this up. I've got this embarrassing thing where I've got one scar on my body that is from something other than a film set; every other scar is about being on a film set."
And, listing his aches, pains and broken bones, the movie star adds, "I've got no cartilage in my toes anymore; that's from doing a whole bunch of lateral stops. I've got grade-four tears in both Achilles tendons. I've got shin splints. I've got bone marrow ademas under both knees. I've got one disintegrating hip.
"I've got a rib in my upper thoracic that pops off my spine, which is a very pleasant morning if that ever happens! I've had two operations on my left shoulder."
