I don't know if that title makes any sense, but it sure sounds cool. We first met Charlie on jackass 3D in 2010, when he came on as our stunt coordinator. Charlie was awesome, because he actually worked with us on stunts—not against us as many safety advisors had in the past—and he got the joke. He knew not only what we were going for but what the fans wanted as well, and he did everything in his power to deliver on all safety and funny fronts, making him an invaluable on-set asset. Plus, he has a really sweet pistol tattooed on his hip. So come along and enjoy as Rick Kosick takes us inside the glamorous world of a professional Hollywood stuntman with an intimate portrait of Charles Grisham.
Kosick: So how did you become a stuntman?
Charlie: I was playing college football at the time, and I had a friend who was a producer’s assistant and they needed some heavy lifting done. So I grabbed a couple of my linemen and we went down there. All we had to do was move some props around and we got like $200 bucks. I was like, “Hey, I wanna get into this!” so he said, “You should learn how to load film.” So I learned how to load and I was going to be a camera guy. Then first film that I was working on there was a bunch of stunt guys who were all athletes and I ended up hitting it off with them. They took me under their wing and nine months later I had my SAG card.
So this is just something you fell into?
Yeah. It’s funny, though. I was a huge Burt Reynolds fan as a kid, like Hooper was one of my favorite movies. I thought that was awesome, and I was kidding around like, “I’m going to be a stunt guy!” We’d always do fight scenes on the playgrounds, jump off stuff and everything, but as I got older I wasn’t that serious about it until it just kinda landed in my lap.
How many years have you been working in the industry now?
Twenty-five. It’s been a decent career.
So after all these years do you still see yourself as a stuntman or are you more of a safety guy now?
No, I still see myself as a stunt guy. I mostly get called to do stunt coordinating. You know, as you get older, the body… I can still do stuff, it just hurts a lot more and your body just doesn’t recover. So there comes a point like, is it worth doing this for the art—and obviously a paycheck, too—but is it worth limping and having this nagging injury for six months from now? Don’t get me wrong, I love doing stunts. It's cool and thrilling… that little bit of excitement from getting stuck in some crazy spots, the adrenaline… I still have that, but not as much as I did. I’ve done so much now that it’s almost not so much about that for me anymore. It’s more about the art of filmmaking and how do we make it look good. I’ve learned over the years that doing it safer can actually make it look better. And the couple of times I’ve gotten to do some second unit directing—you know, directing the action and the stunts and everything—I have a passion for that and the whole process of filmmaking. That’s what I really love.
How many movies have you been a part of now?
I don’t even know, but I’d say over 250. Well, that wouldn’t be like just movies… that would be movies, TV, music videos, commercials—everything all put together is definitely over 250–300.
What have been a couple of your favorites?
Hands down, and I’m not just saying this for the interview, but Bad Grandpa was probably one of my favorites. That was absolutely amazing.
Was there a particular stunt that you liked coordinating with Knoxville?
Yeah, my favorite stunt was the window gag. Especially to do it with real people walking around that don’t know what’s going on inside and outside the store. A lot of people see that and they don’t realize that if Knoxville stuck his head up high enough, he could’ve got scalped. And when I say scalped, I mean literally scalped. That window wasn’t very high for as high and far as we were shooting him through it.
Yeah, it was a pretty intense moment.
I remember we were working kinda late nights, and I remember telling Knoxville, “Hey, you gotta come test this back at the warehouse later.” It turned into one of those days that went way longer than it was supposed to, and he really didn’t want to test it, but I had to put my foot down. I said, “If you don’t test this, you can’t do it.” That was the only way I was going to get him to test it, and he really needed to because when you rode that thing it wanted to pop your chest forward and your head up, so you gotta hunker down almost like a rodeo cowboy and stay down low to get through the window. So he rode it once or twice just to get the feel of it, and I’m really glad he did. He did everything exactly the way I said and he came out exactly like I wanted him to with a little shoulder roll. I remember he said, “I can’t do that, I’m not a stunt guy like you, I don’t know what I’m actually doing.” I said, “Just tuck a little bit. You’ll go right over.” Sure enough, he did and landed right onto the mattresses we had on the ground. So it was perfect. I don’t think he even got a scratch, which is rare for him.
Did you work on any of the jackass movies?
Yeah! I worked on jackass 3D. My favorite, the jet-ski jump, really had me nervous. That was one of those stunts, too, where you see it and you’re like, “Yeah, that was pretty crazy, but it wasn’t that crazy.” But if you really understand the stunt, when you’re jumping a V-haul—which is the bottom of a boat or jet ski which is shaped like a V—I’ve actually seen somebody die doing that. It’s very, very dangerous, and to get the ramp and the speed and everything just right… to be honest with you, I couldn’t believe he actually landed that thing. He had to have jumped that jet-ski out of the pool 30-feet.
What about Ryan Dunn’s “Snake River Jump”?
Yeah, that was pretty intense. Jumping a minibike that far, hitting that much speed coming in… I remember we put a bunch of really soft sod on the other side, because I had a feeling he was going to come up short. That was a really fun day.
You were also prominently featured in a Spiderman movie, correct?
Yes. I actually did a pretty cool gag where Doc takes one of his tentacles and grabs me and throws me out one of the side windows, but for whatever reason it didn't make the movie. They ended up just using my acting part where I had to stand up there in front of Doc Oc.
Would you consider the volleyball sequence featured in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to be the role you were born to play?
Absolutely not. That’s a funny story, though. A good buddy of mine, Mark, covers for me on a lot of shows if I can’t be there, or if I have more than one show going on at the time, and he called me up to do a volleyball scene. I happened to be available, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll come out, I can hit a volleyball.” When I got to set I couldn’t find Mark, so I went into my wardrobe trailer and there’s just a pair of jeans. So I put these jeans on and they’re like extra, extra tight. So I go over to wardrobe and I’m like, “Hey, these jeans are kinda tight, I don’t know if I can jump in these.” The wardrobe girl is like, “Yup, those are perfect.” Then I was like, “I don’t think you guys left a shirt or anything else in there for me,” and she said, “That’s because you’re not wearing one, honey.” I was like, “Okay, this is weird…,” so I kept my own shirt on and went to set, but I still couldn’t find Mark. I’d worked on Always Sunny a couple of times, which is a phenomenal set to work on, but then they had somebody directing who wasn’t usually the director and this guy starts directing us, and telling me that my shirt has to come off. And then this girl comes over and starts oiling us up, and they’re like, “Can you pass the ball around,” so I set it up and we passed it back and forth and hit it over and he hit it back to us. Then all of a sudden it just got really weird. This guy is like, “Hey, can you spike the ball and then embrace each other?” I was like, “Embrace each other? You mean like a high-five?” And he’s like, “Yeah, but can you hug each other and give him one of those football player taps on the ass.” It just started getting weird, like really, really weird, and then I finally hear laughing way over in the corner of the gym at the video village. My buddy Mark, the stunt coordinator, is just dying laughing with a couple of cast who were really directing the episode that day. They were trying to do a really homoerotic version of the Tom Cruise volleyball scene. It was pretty funny, but yeah, I definitely got swooped into that one.
How many hot dudes did you wrestle on the set of 300: Rise of an Empire?
I didn’t wrestle anybody. Lots of fights and stuff. A show we did wrestle on was Meet the Spartans, which was a spoof of the 300 movie. There were a lot of shenanigans on that set.
When you’re on set, you always seem to be watching out and paying attention to other details. Is that something you’re required to do?
Always. That’s constantly what you’re doing. Anytime I’m at home, a restaurant, or anywhere, I just start looking and seeing stuff. Like look at the edge of that chair, that could cut somebody, look at that table, that’s not friendly… once you’ve seen it enough times, you know what can happen. You just start looking for anything that could snag or catch or cut or hurt people. Most of the stunts where people get hurt—and I’m not talking about like hurt bad, where they’re dead or maimed or something, I’m talking about five or six stitches—it’s something really silly. You would never imagine somebody getting hurt rolling off a 3- or 4-foot table to a pad, you’re like, “My five year old could do that,” but look at the base on this table: when they roll off it’s going to come down after them and hit them on the head. So let’s get a sandbag on the bottom of that table. If the sandbag wasn’t on the table, and then the table fell over and the edge hit them on the forehead, they get nine stitches across their forehead with a scar the rest of their lives. Then everyone’s like, “So and so hurt on set….” So you learn real quick to keep your eye open for all those kind of things.
A perfect example, one of my first days on jackass 3D, Knoxville and Dunn each grabbed the end of a pole vault stick, holding it flat, and they were going to run into a tree. I didn’t know everyone too well, but I know if you don’t thump these guys a little bit then the crowd isn’t getting what they want to see. At the same time, you know, in my world actors don’t ever get hurt. So I was trying to bind my world with your guys’ world to try and figure out how to keep everybody happy and get footage. But I remember looking at that and I told them, “That’s not going to work. You guys would have to hit that tree in a perfectly flat spot, which is slim to none odds, and your guys’ weight distribution would have to be absolutely perfect, which you guys don’t weigh exactly the same amount and you’re not exactly the same distance away from the center of the stick.” I got what they were going for, but I was just like, “This is really going to hurt and it’s not going to look like it hurts. It’s one of those kind of gags, and I know you want gags that hurt a little bit but look really good.” Anyway, that day they went for it, and Knoxville, the way he had his thumb on the stick, when they hit the tree it pushed his thumb back so far that the skin between his index finger and thumb ripped. He had to get three or four stitches, and that kinda bummed me out. That’s one thing that’s tough about working with Knoxville… he is very loyal to his fans. He won’t fake anything. He considers us testing it to dial it in for him almost like cheating. So sometimes it’s tough to keep him safe, if you know what I mean, but I think we have a good working relationship. I don’t want to cheat him or his fans. At the same time, though, if he gets hurt bad then he’s useless to his fans. There’s a fine line there.
So is Knoxville one of the few people that does his own stunts or is there anyone else that you’ve worked with that’s stepped up to the plate like he has?
He absolutely is the only one, I mean, except for the other jackass guys, you know. Those guys are the only ones that I’ve ever really seen to be allowed to do what they’ve done. There’s a lot of money that goes into filming and that’s why they don’t let any actors do that stuff. Because when you go out and book locations, have the crew and a schedule to keep, one silly little black eye or two stitches here or there and now you’ve reset the whole schedule and you’re losing money. A lot of times we come across actors who want to do their own stunts, but they’re never allowed to. Well, Tom Cruise jumps in there a lot, but we will test something for almost three to four weeks to where it runs flawless. So, unless something breaks or doesn’t go right, he’s not gonna get hurt, but just the fact that he gets in there is still impressive. Knoxville is the only one that not only demands to do his own stunts, he 100-percent does them. You know, I always tease Knoxville… he’s not the most talented guy in the world as far as doing stunts—which I think adds to his gags, that’s why it’s so funny to watch—but what he lacks in talent he makes up for in balls. He’s done some stuff that there’s no way I would do, like when he gets in there with the bulls… nobody could pay me that much to get near those bulls like he does. Or getting on that rocket at the end of the pier twice. After the side blew out and almost blew his stomach out… that would’ve killed him. There’s no way I would’ve gone on that. So yeah, he is, hands down, the ballsiest I’ve seen.
One time we were doing a thing for the Daily Show, talking about Obamacare, and Knoxville had to get kicked in the nuts by his assistant Amanda. And I mean she came up and kicked him as hard as she could in the nuts. I wanted to put a cup on him, and I had like a crotch-strap that would’ve protected him, but he wouldn’t wear it because of his fans. Because it’s gotta be real. It didn’t make too much sense to me, I mean I get it, a little bit, but she ended up kicking him 17 times, because he wouldn’t take it if she just kinda got him—it had to be a direct hit. So by the end of the day he had a bruise on his inner thigh the size of a frisbee, and it was purple, black, yellow, and green already. It was crazy, man, I couldn’t believe that it… the loyalty he has for his fan base is insane. But I’m getting ready to do another film with him in a month.
Oh yeah? That’s cool.
Yeah, it should be good. It’s a great idea, a perfect part for him. It’s a movie about Action Park, the big dangerous water park/amusement park back in New York during the late ’70s/early ’80s.
Do you have any regrettable tattoos?
Yeah, I have one regrettable tattoo that I covered up with another tattoo—the one that you’re referring to. When I was younger, I made the mistake of putting somebody’s name on my body, and then I got that covered up with a gun on my hip.
(All photos by Sean Cliver, aside from the hot shit cinematic screen grabs from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Spiderman 2.)
