The 48-year-old filmmaker David Leitch has helmed the new action comedy movie that features Ryan as the battle-scarred stuntman Colt Seavers and explained how the 'Barbie' star had an instrumental role in constructing his alter ego.
Speaking to Screen Rant, David said: "Ryan was completely influential in shaping this character. He came on early in the development process, the only actor we went to. And we had a conversation early on that was like, 'Hey man, I'm good at romance. Have you seen 'The Notebook'? And I did 'The Nice Guys', I can be funny. I just did this thing called 'Gray Man'. I sort of dipped my toe into action, but I'd love to make 'The Fall Guy' sort of something where I can do all of that stuff and really have fun with all of my skill sets.' And so, from the development phase, he was really influential in creating this character, and even scene for scene all the way up to shooting, even into post, we were close collaborators on this project".
The 'Bullet Train' director explained that Ryan and his co-star encouraged producer Kelly McCormick to change the tone of the movie so it featured more romantic elements.
Leitch explained: "It's funny, it started out as a noir, and we were going to do sort of an L.A. noir, but I think Ryan influenced Kelly McCormick, and [so did] our creative producer and Emily. There were a lot of influences, but we kept leaning more into fun. Ryan brought up the romance. Kelly was working on Emily's character to take her from makeup artist to director. The noirish investigation fell off, and we're starting to lean into this rom-com as we're developing the script in this sort of collaborative bubble. We just started to lean into the fun and what a beautiful experience it is to make movies and how we spread that joy in this film, so it was like fun choices overrode everything else we could make".