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The Bondsman Stunt Coordinator on Bees, Kevin Bacon/Stunts & More

The Bondsman stunt coordinator James Hutchinson spoke with Bleeding Cool about the bees scene, why Kevin Bacon passed on a stunt, and more.

James Hutchinson III has had the kind of career most in his field dream of since his start in 2011. Two years later, he would already work in mainstream TV and films with CBS's Person of Interest, NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Fox's Castle, and Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). He would go on to work on several franchises, including Godzilla (2014), MTV's Teen Wolf, several DC and Marvel films and TV shows. Hutchinson isn't looking to slow down any time soon with his latest work on Prime Video's supernatural series The Bondsman, which focuses on a bounty hunter (Kevin Bacon), who gets a new lease on life hunting demons while investigating his unique circumstance as an agent of the devil. He spoke to Bleeding Cool about whether he's faced any circumstances where he's had to be more resourceful than usual on a production, if he's working on any future Marvel project, memorable stunts from the Grainger David series, and the one stunt Bacon bailed on.

The Bondsman Stunt Coordinator on His Surprise Working on a Stunt in Dubai, Future & More

Bleeding Cool: You had such a wide variety of work, but the resources may not always be the same. Did you find yourself in a position in a project where you had to scrounge whatever you could because resources weren't there, or was it something you made work matter what?

I try my absolute best to accomplish the vision of my director, but there have been times in the past where I've had to say "No" because we simply cannot accomplish that due to the time that we're given. Here's a fun one, I was shooting a project in Dubai years ago, and we had one of our performers in this part called "Old Dubai," and the buildings there are ancient. We had one of our guys, an incredibly talented in parkour, but they're parkouring over these buildings, and one had to jump off one of the buildings.

The idea was that he lands on the ground, rolls out, and keeps going. Well, we're in Dubai, we don't have, like, we're not bringing our pad kit over. We get there and see what we have available. I'm like, "Okay, we'll build out a box catcher." Usually, you're getting your boxes and you design them in a certain way for your performers to be able to land in them and they crush into it safely. Cardboard boxes in Dubai are not the same as what they have here [in America]. These were like five-ply boxes, and by the time we had built up probably about 10-foot-high boxes, it was a wooden platform. He jumped onto it and landed on his feet. That was it, they didn't cave in at all [laughs]. That was a fun one, getting over there, and realizing these are the resources we have, and we'll make the best of it.

I looked at the stunts that Jackie Chan performed over time and realized it was a miracle that he was still alive today. James, I want to thank you for your time, man. You do such brilliant work, from the stunts across the MCU and DC to your non-comic stuff like 'The Bondsman'. I hope they got you on speed dial for when they get 'Avengers: Doomsday' in production.

A friend of mine, James Young, is doing that, and he'll kill it. He's a fantastic coordinator. My wife, Natasha Paul, and I are coordinating a show here in Atlanta right now called 'The Good Daughter' (on Peacock), and it's not a big action-heavy show, like 'The Bondsman.' It's definitely in the realm that it's got some stuff in it with some challenges in a different way. We're all over here hoping that the work picks up, man, because it's definitely been challenging seeing all this stuff go overseas.

I'm looking forward to hoping that it comes through.

Did you have any bits from 'The Bondsman' that were your favorites?

I enjoyed the underwater sequence. I also liked the opening sequence to introduce Kevin Bacon's character, Hub, which was brutal. I love the whole bees segment there, and obviously, you can't use real bees, but your imagination, right?

That took so long, because there was an actual…we're in this hotel down somewhere in Georgia, down south. It was a working motel, and we had to basically have them remove the actual air conditioning unit so Kevin could get the damn bees' nest in there. That was the biggest struggle to get that stupid thing in through the opening. That sequence was fun.

I'm proud of my boy Thomas [Watson] because of the shotgun he took to the back. Our rigging team on that was Justin Woods and Loren Dennis; I had to tell them it's one of the things with shotgun blasts in film. For doing a wire pull, if you keep tension on the line and you pull somebody, there's a little bit of a lead-up to the pull. I was like, "Thomas, I hate to do this to you, but this is a shotgun. It's got to take you down quick." I was like, "We're going to leave a little bit of slack in the line, so when they snap it, it's just going to pull you." We did about two or three, and man, it looked like it snatched the soul out of that young man every time, but he never complained once. He is a true stuntman. Kid's a killer.

I'm surprised you're able to fit Kevin inside that drywall. At his age, are you supposed to bend like that?

That whole thing, we just did it. That was the little build that we had on the stage. They basically had a little wall, and we were able to just kind of wheel it in and get it tighter and tighter until Kevin basically was like, "I'm good. That's tight enough" [laughs]. There was only one time when Kevin actually got upset. I recall this was when he was chained up on the bench and Lucky [Damon Herriman] was torturing him. He's a guitar player, and on one of the takes, it was a foam hammer. It's soft, but if you hit somebody hard enough, you'll feel it. Damon hit him with the foam, and Kevin was like, "I'm done. Saving my digits, I play guitar." That's when we ended up having to bring Thomas in to get his fingers smashed.

The Bondsman, which also stars Jennifer Nettles, Beth Grant, Damon Herriman, Maxwell Jenkins, Jolene Purdy, and Denitra Isler, is available to stream on Prime Video.

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