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Gymnast-turned-stunt performer Bobby Holland Hanton will soon be seen fighting small and big screen battles, first in this weekend's The Avengers: Age of Ultron (he doubled for both Chris Evans' Captain America and Chris Hemsworth's Thor) and in the final stretch of Game of Thrones Season 5. Later this year, the two-time Taurus World Stunt Awards nominee will also defy dangerous in his third Bond flick, Spectre, and the most-anticipated movie of the year, Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens. Yetnot so long ago, he dressed as a pirate everyday to high-dive from a tower at LEGOLAND.
Recently, the 30-year-old Brit was in New York for a few hours to promote Dove Men+Care, a line of skincare products he's used for the past four years (they come in handy when scrubbing off the industrial-strength concealer used to cover up his 12 tattoos). Esquire met Hannon for lunch at Trump Soho's sushi restaurant, Koi, where he dined on sashimi and shared behind-the-scenes secrets from nine of his most high-profile projects.
Quantum of Solace (2008)
"My first film was doubling Daniel Craig as Bond. [I was] 23. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end but also having to learn on the job. Learning on such a high-profile job, there's no room for mistakes. As fickle as it sounds, our industry is like that—you make a mistake and you're known for it. People remember you for the bad things.
"If you're a stunt performer and you hit the actor in a fight, that's really frowned upon. But if the actor hits you, then it's no problem. If the actor hits you, the stunt performer will still probably get blamed. That's just what is funny about it. But it's up to us to make sure we've got our shit tight. The actors put a lot of faith in their stunt performers, and they want to know that they're safe in your hands. If you want to do your job properly, you've got to know your actor inside and out.
"In Quantum of Solace I did the balcony jump in Panama—the scene where he's with Jeffrey Wright basically jumping from one balcony to another. That was with no cables. That was two in the morning, and there was no safety underneath [so] the camera could see me go [across]. We did two takes. But if that had gone wrong it would have gone really wrong."
Thor (2011)
"Chris [Hemsworth] is naturally bigger than me. He's 6' 4'', so I have to wear lifts when we're filming [Hanton is 6-foot-one]. Chris has a full head of hair for Thor; sometimes I've got these wigs on for 14 hours a day. And when we're doing stuff like Thor and Avengers, I have to train twice a day and eat eight meals a day to get to Chris's size, because he's just huge. Chris is not only big he's also lean, which is annoying 'cause it's easier to do one or the other."
The Green Lantern (2011)
"I injured my back pretty bad on The Green Lantern. A hernia ruptured two discs and slipped my vertebrae. Basically it was a stunt they wanted that they didn't get around to shooting—scripts change all the time. It was on a wire being ratcheted, jerked back, and they wanted [me] to land and slide on a concrete floor. We rehearsed it maybe 15, 20 times—I've got all my pads on—and I think my back just kind of gave up. It was my sciatic [nerve] that was pretty bad. I then had an operation in Dallas. There's one percent of people who have the operation and they get a bone and disc infection and I was that one percent. Which was really unlucky. It took me over a year to get back to full fitness. "
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
"Harry Potter was an experience. Being a Death Eater, pretending to put spells on people with these wands, and fights [where] they added the CGI afterwards. It's quite funny standing in a long black cloak throwing this wand around at 25, 26 years old, things you should be doing when you're a kid. You have to stand back sometimes and go, 'This is crazy. This is what I did as a kid and now I'm getting paid to do it.' We're all just big kids really. I feel like Peter Pan.
"You just hope you have a career where you don't get—touch wood—major injuries, which does happen. I've got friends that will never work again. David Holmes, broke his neck on Harry Potter [and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2]. I wasn't there for the actual incident, so it definitely wouldn't be right for me to say what happened. He was Daniel Radcliffe's stunt double, and he broke his neck and is paralyzed. So it's serious, it can be; as much as it's fun and games. It wouldn't be stunt work if there wasn't an element of danger."
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
"Sometimes we play characters in the film. I played a character in Inception—Joseph Gordon Levitt throws me down these spiraling stairs. And then I did The Dark Knight Rises with [again] Christopher Nolan and Levitt, and this time 'round I was with Joseph on his team playing a stunt detective that gets killed by Bane's men. So it was funny for him to say to me, 'Hold on a minute—didn't I kill you on the last show we worked on together?' I was like, 'Yeah, now I'm on your team.'"
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
"There was a really great fight that we did on Thor 2 that got cut from the movie. In the end they just said, 'Actually we don't need it. The story is still told without it.' Sometimes that's frustrating because you put a great fight together, the actors learnt it with you, and it gets cut but that's the nature of the beast."
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
"We filmed Jupiter Ascending six weeks in Chicago; the rest of it was in London. There was a guy that was a friend of ours that had a yacht that would just take us out on our days off on Lake Michigan. Channing [Tatum] for his birthday took me and a couple of other stunt performers to Arsenal's Football Ground [in] Highbury, London. It was a big game—Arsenal rematched United. He took Mila Kunis as well, his whole team, basically. And that was nice; he didn't have to take us. He was a real lovely dude."
Game of Thrones: Season 5(2015)
"I was a general stunt performer [in three of this season's last four episodes]—general fights, general falls. The bread and butter of the stunt industry of a stunt performer. We did lot of everything on there—lots of fights, lots of fire, lots of water, and I just think it's going to be epic. They want to try and raise the bar all the time.
"It was in Spain the first two weeks—34 degrees [Celsius], beautiful weather—then [we went] to Belfast for seven weeks when it was minus 2 degrees. It's cold, it's wet, your tired, trying to keep it fun. Just the boys messing about with each other and trying to keep morale."
"Sometimes if you were doing a background fight and the camera's panning across, you choreograph something with a partner just before action. On 'Three, two, one' you knock the sword out of their hand and they're like, 'Shit!' And they'll quickly pick it up. But you don't want to do it when it's 'Action!' time because then you'll certainly get a grilling for it. It's just keeping them on their toes."
The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
"[Chris Hemsworth] looks after me, I'll go and stay with him at his house, we go on holidays [Hanton is now included in Hemsworth contract; they are currently shooting The Huntsman, next year's sequel to Snow White and The Huntsman]. We went to Costa Rica. He took his team and the whole family last summer. He's just wants his friends around. Like he's like, "Come on, let's go." We just chilled out. The boys went surfing. I've never surfed in my life so they're at a high level of surfing and I didn't want to show myself up so I didn't go surfing. Maybe I could have gone with his daughter India whose three and we could have learned together.
"I'm very lucky to do what I love to do, work with amazing people, and then I get to go home and be normal and go out with my friends. [Hemsworth] can't just go down a normal pub with the boys like he would like to do and chill out because he'd just get harassed."
