ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday star Scott Adkins about enhancing the action scenes in the sequel, which is out October 14 via digital and on demand.
“The Accident Man is back and this time he must beat the top assassins in the world to protect the ungrateful son of a mafia boss, save the life of his only friend and rekindle his relationship with his maniacal father figure,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday is just so much fun. What were the challenges of working on a sequel and building upon the great base you had with the original Accident Man?
Scott Adkins: We wanted to take the things we learned from the first one and obviously present the same sort of film again, but with better action, more comedy, more colorful, crazy characters, and yeah, that was the plan. I think I’m very happy with the first one and how it turned out. You know, it’s not easy making these independent movies. You don’t have the luxury of time and money. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. But I was very happy and it was received very well, but for this one I certainly wanted to make it funnier and I do think we achieved that and, I think we’ve got better action as well, to be honest.
The comedy definitely lands. I know you worked on crafting the story for both of these movies. So can you talk about just working on the humor and kind of instilling that British cheekiness to the script?
Well, Stu Small is the writer and we came up with this story together. But he’s a very funny, witty guy. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and he’s got that sort of schoolboy humor that works well for this and clearly is. And, we came up with the structure of the story together, and then Stu went away and wrote it with his great dialogue and, then when the Kirbys came onto it, they added lots to the scripts structurally, and they were great. We’re happy with what we had and were able to make it a little later than we wanted. It took a few too many years to get the sequel out, unfortunately. But, you know, the pandemic didn’t help, but I’m happy that people get to see the sequel now.
Tell me a bit about the Kirby Brothers. I know they had that YouTube channel for so long, they were doing these really cool shorts on YouTube and doing some inventive stuff with VR. How did you get in touch with them? They seemed like a perfect fit.
They absolutely were the perfect fit and I was lucky to find them. I actually met George Kirby on Doctor Strange. He was Benedict Cumberbatch’s stunt double. So I know him from then and I saw their YouTube stuff, but they sent me the short that they did. There’s another film that they’re going to get off the ground and they did a short sort of concept, 10-minute thing of how they spill that, and they gave it to me and it was fantastic. Visually stylish, action was top-notch, and they’d not done a film yet.
So I was like, “Guys, you want to direct Accident Man 2?” And luckily for me, they said yes because, first of all, they understand the action completely coming from the stunt world. Second of all, they’re all about comedy and lighthearted sort of entertaining. That’s what they do. They understand visual effects, which, in this day and age, that really helps. And they’re English, and understand the sort of world of Accident Man, and the Englishness of the whole situation. So perfect. Couldn’t have gotten a better choice.
You spoke about the action even being better in the sequel, what was the most difficult stunt to work on during this film? Because the action looks great throughout.
Oh, most difficult stunt. Well, they threw me out the van at that one point just because it was the last day of shooting, and the schedule changed actually. And it’s like, “Oh, well I’m not doing anything, I’m just going to go home tomorrow, so you might as well throw me out of the van.” So that was fun. Then the fights, I mean they’re all hard. I hurt my knee in the first week, which sucks because then I’m in pain for the rest of the shoot, and it’s harder to do some of the movements, but that happens sometimes, just got to get on with it. The show must go on.
One thing that’s really nice about the sequel is you’ve got a good mix of faces, old and new, there are some great returning characters. How important was it to kind of have that connective tissue and continue building off that story that we had in the first film?
Well, yeah, I killed most of the characters in the first one, but luckily for me, I didn’t kill Perry Benson and I didn’t kill Ray Stevenson and they are fantastic actors. Ray, of course, has done some amazing things, and he really brings out gravitas that that character needs. I mean, when we originally wrote Big Ray, we said to ourselves, We’re going to write this so good because we, we want to attract a great actor. And we did in Ray Stevenson, so of course, we had to bring him back. And Perry Benson was like, that’s one of those characters that, 0when we did the first one, you didn’t necessarily know that he was going to be as popular as he turned out, and he kind of steals the show in most of the scenes he’s in. And so we’re able to bring him into this one in a much bigger way. And the relationship between my character and his character, the bromance that’s going on, I think it’s really entertaining and that’s what we wanted this film to be about, was friendship. That was sort of the theme for the movie.
This has been such a great year for you. Day Shift just came out, and the director of that, J. J. Perry, also has a stunt background. The vampire fights in that movie just looked so awesome. How was it filming that and doing those different types of stunts?
J. J., man, he’s coming from stunts, obviously, he’s done a lot of second-unit directing. That was hard, that day. We shot me and Steve Howey’s stuff for one day, for the whole day. We got all the action done and there was not even a lunch break and I was like, “We’re in America. Is this even allowed? We’re doing French hours!!” And it was bang, bang, bang, bang onto the next, onto the next. I was actually really tired, because I’d had a bit of time off and… yeah, J.J. just, he pushes you. You have to push to get good action, you have to push the crew, you have to push the stunts, you have to push the actors, have to push everyone, because it’s about getting all the different shots. The more stuff you’ve got, the better it’s going to look, and he understood that, and I was just really thankful. I’ve worked with him in the past before and I was really thankful that he entrusted me in that role in his directorial debut.
RELATED: Day Shift Interview: J. J. Perry on Going From Stuntman to Director
You’ve got John Wick: Chapter 4 coming up. What was your biggest takeaway from just working with another superstar in action movies like Keanu Reeves?
Keanu’s great. Everyone says it, he’s the nicest guy and he truly is. He’s just such a down-to-earth nice guy that’s interested in everybody’s life and genuinely, he’s a sweetheart. But listen man, when he gets into John Wick mode and he starts doing his thing, it’s intense. Keanu Reeves is one of the greatest action stars on the planet, without question. He’s one of the top five, in my opinion. He’s up there with Jackie Chan, he’s up there with all of them because, time and time again, he puts his heart and his soul into these action films. Think about how many action films he’s done now, he’s on the fourth John Wick, fourth Matrix, Point Break, Speed, amazing action films, all of them. And even going into his mid-fifties, he’s still grinding them out. You got to respect that he’s given his body and his limbs to the action genre, and he deserves his respect, and he is an absolute pleasure to work with him.
