Wakanda Forever‘s Winston Duke joins the cast of Ryan Gosling’s The Fall Guy
No word yet on who Duke will play in David Leitch's updated version of the classic Lee Majors action-adventure show
Aux News Winston Duke
Winston Duke has joined the cast of Ryan Gosling’s upcoming The Fall Guy, THR reports, adding yet another big name to the list of folks signing on for Gosling’s stuntman-focused action-adventure. Duke—who’ll be showing up on screen soon in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and who showed off his more comedic side a few years back in Jordan Peele’s Us—has joined David Leitcth’s adaptation of the ’80s Lee Majors TV series.
And while The Fall Guy hasn’t quite hit what we think of as the “Glass Onion inflection point”—i.e., that point where you notice the list of names attached to a project flipping over from “Hey, nice” to “Woah, good fucking cast!”—it’s definitely getting there. In addition to Gosling and Duke, the film will also co-star Emily Blunt and Stephanie Hsu, plus Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Rather than directly adapt the slightly dated (if also fairly badass) premise of the show—stuntman moonlights as a bounty hunter, does many stunts along the way—the film version sounds a little more staid, with Gosling playing an aging stunt guy who discovers that the guy he used to double for has gone missing. Mysteries—and, god willing, stunts—ensue.
No word yet on who Duke will be playing, but we’d be lying if we didn’t clock that his attachment is building our excitement for the project, which went into development back in 2020. (After years of studio executives turning to each other and going “Eh, we’ve got this Fall Guy license, anybody interested?”) (No one was, at least until now.) Duke’s last film role (before Wakanda Forever hits theaters on November 11) was also, as it happens, in a revival of a classic ’80s pulp show; he played Hawk, opposite Mark Wahlberg, in Peter Berg’s 2020 Spenser Confidential.
8 Comments
I had a The Fall Guy board game as a kid, but I don’t recall playing it. I think we got it at a garage sale and there was some concern over missing pieces. Also I didn’t know what a “bail jumper” was. Actually I don’t think I understood any of The Fall Guy’s whole deal at the time, just that it was the show where Lee Majors wasn’t a cyborg.
I watched Fall Guy first run, took it for the popcorn fun action TV show it was, and enjoyed it. We jokingly called it “The Brawl Guy”, I doubt we were being very original.
At no point in the intervening years did it ever occur to me that it would be rebooted.Far more likely they’d reboot The Six Million Dollar Man, properly adjusted for inflation, of course. Even though they tried it with The Bionic Woman already, and that didn’t last long.
I’d forgotten about The Bionic Woman reboot. I remember being excited for it because it was made by one of the Battlestar Galactica creators, and then I don’t remember that much else about watching it apart from the fact it had Katee Sackhoff as an antagonist.
No Lee Majors theme song, no watch
I was kinda disappointed when I found out that Winston Duke isn’t related to Bill Duke, but I’d still like to see Winston in a Predator movie one day.
Me and my friends never remembered his name but we knew Bill Duke always appeared in badass movies with a lot of carnage. We nicknamed him The Grim Reaper because once you saw him on screen, you knew it wasn’t long until someone was gonna meet their maker.
When talking about Winston Duke’s career I wish people mentioned Nine Days more. It never got the coverage, or the love, it deserved, but it’s one of my favourite films and he is spellbinding in it. The sort of performance that should have won him an Oscar (if the Oscars weren’t an insular clique more interested in rewarding films about films and/or films that paid for good coverage, obviously… but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).
Wake me when 1980s Heather Thomas signs on.