‘Safety? I put some rubber on me bum and elbows’: the British stuntmen who made the stars look tough

Long-serving British stuntman Rocky Taylor performed his favourite ever stunt on The Spy Who Loved Me. “I crash a Mini Moke off the pier. Someone throws a hand grenade, it blows up, and I go up a ramp with three stuntmen in the back and into the water. It was wonderful… a lovely film for me.”

Taylor, now 76 and still in the stunt game (he’s on call for the new Mission: Impossible when we speak), is also the only stuntman to double for two 007s in the same year – both Roger Moore and Sean Connery for rival 1983 Bond films Octopussy and Never Say Never Again. He has a Guinness world record, which he proudly tells me is still in his house.

For Octopussy, he doubled Moore in India – swinging through the jungle and jumping over a camel in a tuk tuk. When Taylor returned home, stunt legend Vic Armstrong called from the Bahamas, asking him to fill in on Never Say Never Again.

“I was in the Bahamas for seven weeks,” he says. “I got killed going through the window, I got stabbed, I got shot, I got strangled on a ladder… all in the same title sequence. I think I got killed five times.” It wasn’t all violence. “Sean Connery borrowed my golf clubs because he’d forgotten his,” laughs Taylor.

Fellow stuntman and stunt coordinator Jim Dowdall has a career of 40-plus years. He’s been shot off a gantry in the Death Star; thrown across the Moon by a Kryptonian super-criminal; been wrestled to near-death by Flash Gordon; had more than 300 car crashes; been hung up in a meat locker by Bob Hoskins; and got punched out in GoldenEye while sat on the toilet – at his pal Pierce Brosnan’s insistence (“I want Jim in there,” said Brosnan about the on-the-khazi stunt).

Rocky Taylor and Jim Dowdall both feature in an ITV documentary, Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Falls of the Great British Stuntman, about the glory years of British stuntmen and their bone-crunching influence on action cinema.

Also featured in the film are Vic Armstrong, Greg Powell, Paul Weston, Frank Henson, Richard Hammatt, and Ray Austin. Each boasts an incredible career of stunts and stunt coordination.

The documentary dates back to the days before their generation – back when stuntmen were mostly extras who’d volunteer to get chucked down the stairs for a few extra quid.

“They’d say, ‘I’ll put some rubber on me bum and elbows,’” says Taylor. “That’s how they used to do it. It was never ‘safety first’ like it is today. It was ‘do it if you can. If you can’t, we’ll get somebody else in.’”

The early stunt performers are described as “characters” – boxers, wrestlers, villains, bouncers, wheeler-dealers, and WW2 veterans. Nails-hard, old school blokes. Among that generation was Rocky Taylor’s father, Larry Taylor, an actor, extra, and stuntman best known for playing Hughes in Zulu.

The most celebrated of the old guard was Joe Powell – “the daddy of British stuntmen” – who performed one of the greatest ever stunts. In The Man Who Would Be King he fell more than a 100ft from a rope bridge into a ravine. If he’d missed his mark – a stack of boxes on a ledge – he’d have plummeted another 2,000ft.

As the story goes, the American stuntmen bottled it on the day. A bit of British vs. American rivalry seems to still exist. “There tends to be an enormous amount of shouting,” says Jim Dowdall about US performers. “A kind of ‘look at me’ attitude.” The difference with the Brits, says Dowdall, was “we weren’t looking for publicity”.

Rocky Taylor got his start in 1961. A judo black belt by his teens, he taught Cliff Richard some moves for a comedy punch-up in The Young Ones (“They said, ‘You’re doing so well with Sir Cliff, would you mind playing the lad he has the fight with?’”). His big break came on ITV’s The Avengers. Subsequent TV gigs included The Saint, Department S, and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). “It was like an apprenticeship,” he says.

By 1969, Taylor was skidding in a car down the Cresta Run – the near mile-long toboggan run in Switzerland – in Monte Carlo or Bust. “I had tyres with spikes in to keep a grip,” says Taylor. “There was a helicopter chasing me, six cameras on me, and five or six stuntmen all over the place – in case something went wrong.”

Jim Dowdall, 72, took a different route. He was at school with Prince Charles, joined the circus, and worked as a film armourer (providing firearms for The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare). He joined the parachute regiment and returned to movies for his first ever stunt – racing down a curved flight of stairs in a Victorian wheelchair.

The early days saw plenty of “cowboys” – stuntmen who’d chuck themselves into any situation and were never seen again. Jim Dowdall remembers one stuntman who went by the dubious nickname “fearless”.

“He spent as much time in the hospital as he did on the set,” says Dowdall. “The basic criteria for a stuntman isn’t that he’s broken every bone in his body. That just means he’s f___up a lot.”

Crucial to it, says Dowdall, is understanding fear and limitations. He’s said “no” twice. Early in his career, on the BBC film Rogue Male, he was asked to swing from one castle tower to another. It was rigged wrongly, and he estimated that he’d slam into a brick wall at more than 40mph. Despite being one of his first jobs – and a chance to double for the mighty Peter O’Toole, no less ­– Dowdall declined. The stuntman who took the job proved one of Dowdall’s mottos: bravado will get you hurt.

“He was sitting in the makeup chair going, ‘Those London stuntmen haven’t got any bottle!’” recalls Dowdall. “He finished up breaking his pelvis, three ribs, his shoulder blade, and when they got him down he wasn’t breathing – they had to get him going. He never worked again. That was a salient lesson – I was right. Even in my inexperience I could tell that wasn’t the way to do it.”

Dowdall wrote about his adventures in his book, Man on Fire. He has concentrated on stunt coordinating in later years, but was crashing cars as recently as 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home. He plays down his biggest, most elaborate stunts, which have the most precautions (“It looks spectacular but it’s not by any means the most dangerous”). But he cites one impressive stunt for, erm, Bergerac.

“I did a transfer from a speedboat onto a helicopter at about 45 knots – jumping onto the thing and the going up to 300ft, still hanging under the helicopter,” says Dowdall. “The guy who was in the helicopter and trying to get me in was s___ himself. I kept saying, ‘I’m fine, Steve!’ It was just a day’s work.”

Both Jim Dowdall and Rocky Taylor credit their generation with bringing innovation to the stunt business – in line with emerging techniques of practical effects – and improving safety conditions. Perhaps the biggest game changer was organising the British Stunt Register in 1973. It legitimised stunt work, making it a recognised profession in this country with insurance and contracts.

Vic Armstrong describes it as “a cartel” in those days, with a firm grip on their slice of the film industry. The pinnacle, unsurprisingly, was Bond.

“If you got onto the Bond circuit, you became part of the stunt core,” says Dowdall. “Sometimes you’d play two or three different villains in a day. You’d get shot down the stairs, then they’d put a beard on you and you’d crash a motorbike.”

Rocky Taylor was on-hand for Bond history behind the scenes too. “Roger Moore was a great pal of mine,” he says. “I was at Pinewood Studios with Les Crawford [Moore’s regular double]. We were walking back to the set from lunch, and Roger poked his head around the bottom of the corridor. He went, ‘Rocky! Les! Quick!’ We ran down at 100mph. He said, ‘You’re now looking at James Bond. I just signed the contract!’ He opened a bottle of champagne and danced around singing ‘I’m James Bond! I’m James Bond!’ It was wonderful.”

Taylor was later involved in a horrific accident. On the set of 1985’s Death Wish 3, director Michael Winner asked Taylor to jump from the roof of a burning building. Winner ordered the flames much higher than necessary – 17ft high and frighteningly hot – causing Taylor to botch the jump. He broke his pelvis and vertebrae, and suffered burns.

Winner came to the hospital with reporters for a photo op. While posing, Winner whispered, “Don’t think you can sue me, Rocky, you won’t get away with it.” He was out of action for four years.

In the age of CG stunt work has evolved again, with better safety precautions than ever – now safety equipment can just be digitally erased. Taylor points to the size of the cables Tom Cruise used for running around the Burj Khalifa at 17,000ft in Mission: Impossible – “The building would have to come down before he fell off,” Taylor laughs – a long way from his father’s generation throwing themselves out of a window for a few pound notes.

Hollywood Bulldogs is on ITVX now