Film stunt man Jim Burton is a professional stunt man and his work regularly involves falling through windows,

crashing cars and being shot at. When a film includes dangerous scenes and film companies

want to avoid putting actors at risk, they call on professional stunt men and women to stand in for

them. Although the stunts Jim does are very carefully planned by his support team, there’s always

a chance that he could get hurt. “I’ve broken lots of bones in the time I’ve been doing this job,”

Jim says. “It’s not nice, but it comes with the job.” After 20 years as a film stunt man, Jim still feels

great excitement before each new stunt.

Stunt men and women are the hidden heroes of cinema. When a film character jumps out of

a plane or flies through the air on a magical motorbike, it’s the famous actors who get all the

attention. Audiences don’t appreciate stunt performers. “That can be really annoying,” Jim admits,

“although it’s quite understandable. People who want to be stunt performers accept this as part of

the job.”

Jim was fortunate because when he left school, a family friend working in film production helped

him get small acting parts in a number of films. That’s how he gained 60 hours of general film

acting experience, which is one of the UK film industry’s requirements to become a qualified

stunt performer. Some training is available from certain specialist schools, but for many stunt

performers, their job is a kind of extension of the activities that they enjoyed when growing up.

Jim, for example, was keen on gymnastics, swimming and rock climbing as a teenager. He also

came from a family of motorbike fans, and by the time he had decided that he would like to be

a stunt man, he was an expert motorbike rider. All professional stunt men and women in the UK

have to join the professional stunt performers’ association, and to do this, it is compulsory for

them to achieve instructor level in six stunt skills, one of which is being able to fall and land safely.

Even after they have fulfilled all the requirements to work as a professional stunt man or woman,

there is no guarantee of regular work. The danger and skills involved mean that stunt performers

tend to receive high fees for the work they do, but their employment is unpredictable. “To get work

consistently, you need to build up good relationships with film producers and directors,” says Jim.

“You also need to be very flexible because the hours tend to be long, which is obviously a problem

if, like me, you’ve got a family.”

Despite these difficulties, Jim can’t imagine doing anything else. He recently had to design and

carry out a stunt which involved entering a building which was on fire, and running out with his

clothes in flames. In his previous film, he jumped off a bridge onto a moving truck. “The stunt

worked really well,” he says. “We make actors look cool in films and they often say how grateful

they are, which is really nice.”

Requirements to work as a professional stunt performer in the UK:

•

•

The good things about the job:

•

•

•

•

The bad things about the job:

•

•

•