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It has been 40 years since Guy Norris was Bearclaw Mohawk of the Lord Humungus Marauders, leaping onto the back of a speeding petrol tanker with a steel crossbow attached to a sharpened set of claws, and biting through the rear window. But he remembers the Mad Max 2 action scene fondly. “Wow, that’s going back a while; how times flies, eh? But hey, I loved every minute of it,” the elder statesman of Australia’s stuntman community said. “I must have jumped up there maybe 10 times for that particular scene. It was wild. That was a wild movie to work on, but just fantastic.” Guy Norris, now has a son, Harlan, the same age as when he played multiple Marauder roles in the George Miller’s Mad Max series of action movies. Both his sons are now stuntmen. “The Mad Max movies were a really big career break for me,” he said. In more ways than one. In one dangerous stunt during Road Warrior, Mr Norris was catapulted badly from a motorcycle, spun several times in the air and slammed into the ground. The accident forced him off the set, into an ambulance and off to hospital for several days. “I broke my femur doing a live show when I was 18 so I already had a pin inside holding it together,” he said. “On Road Warrior, I rebroke the bone and bent the pin. So I had a couple of days in hospital, a couple of days at home and went back on set on crutches. “It was important to finish the film because I played seven characters.” Guy Norris has returned to Canberra this week after a very long absence. This time he is behind the camera as the second unit director for the Hollywood movie Blacklight, which stars Liam Neeson, and is filming car stunts on Canberra’s city roads. Sections of Canberra’s streets will be shut for the filming in the coming days, as the stunt sequences play out using a Dodge Challenger ST Hellcat with a 6.2 litre V8 engine, as the hero car, a Porsche and a garbage truck. The megabuck budgets of Hollywood movies he’s worked on recently such as Ghost In The Shell, X-Men and Suicide Squad are a far cry from his early days as a stuntman, touring Australia’s agricultural shows from Mt Isa to Canberra, “following the carnival circuit” and performing a half-hour of non-stop stunts as a Saturday night special show in the main arena. READ MORE: “We’d do high falls [while] on fire, exploding coffin acts, car crashes, bike crashes, clown acts; lots of things that had colour and movement in them,” he said. “I did that for three years and it was during the course of one of those live shows that Max Aspin, who was the stunt coordinator on Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, managed to get me an introduction to George Miller. “George must have seen something in me because that was a really major step in my career.” He’s based on the Gold Coast and has a full year ahead, shooting a Mad Max prequel, again with George Miller directing.
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It has been 40 years since Guy Norris was Bearclaw Mohawk of the Lord Humungus Marauders, leaping onto the back of a speeding petrol tanker with a steel crossbow attached to a sharpened set of claws, and biting through the rear window.
But he remembers the Mad Max 2 action scene fondly.
“Wow, that’s going back a while; how times flies, eh? But hey, I loved every minute of it,” the elder statesman of Australia’s stuntman community said.
“I must have jumped up there maybe 10 times for that particular scene. It was wild. That was a wild movie to work on, but just fantastic.”
Guy Norris on the set of Blacklife in Canberra. Picture: Supplied
Guy Norris, now has a son, Harlan, the same age as when he played multiple Marauder roles in the George Miller’s Mad Max series of action movies. Both his sons are now stuntmen.
“The Mad Max movies were a really big career break for me,” he said.
In one dangerous stunt during Road Warrior, Mr Norris was catapulted badly from a motorcycle, spun several times in the air and slammed into the ground. The accident forced him off the set, into an ambulance and off to hospital for several days.
“I broke my femur doing a live show when I was 18 so I already had a pin inside holding it together,” he said.
“On Road Warrior, I rebroke the bone and bent the pin. So I had a couple of days in hospital, a couple of days at home and went back on set on crutches.
“It was important to finish the film because I played seven characters.”
The poster for Mad Max 2, with Guy Norris as Mohawk Biker. Picture: National Film and Sound Artchive
Guy Norris has returned to Canberra this week after a very long absence.
This time he is behind the camera as the second unit director for the Hollywood movie Blacklight, which stars Liam Neeson, and is filming car stunts on Canberra’s city roads.
Sections of Canberra’s streets will be shut for the filming in the coming days, as the stunt sequences play out using a Dodge Challenger ST Hellcat with a 6.2 litre V8 engine, as the hero car, a Porsche and a garbage truck.
The megabuck budgets of Hollywood movies he’s worked on recently such as Ghost In The Shell, X-Men and Suicide Squad are a far cry from his early days as a stuntman, touring Australia’s agricultural shows from Mt Isa to Canberra, “following the carnival circuit” and performing a half-hour of non-stop stunts as a Saturday night special show in the main arena.
“We’d do high falls [while] on fire, exploding coffin acts, car crashes, bike crashes, clown acts; lots of things that had colour and movement in them,” he said.
“I did that for three years and it was during the course of one of those live shows that Max Aspin, who was the stunt coordinator on Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, managed to get me an introduction to George Miller.
“George must have seen something in me because that was a really major step in my career.”
He’s based on the Gold Coast and has a full year ahead, shooting a Mad Max prequel, again with George Miller directing.
