The Fall Guy - Action Figure

Back in November 2023, I was commissioned by Empire magazine to create an illustration for the cover of their subscriber's issue. The theme was Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt's upcoming action comedy, 'The Fall Guy'. Working with Chris Lupton and the team, I ended up creating a CGI action figure of Ryan as Colt Seavers, a stunt man, taking the fall in more ways than one.

The cover went down well and I started getting messages from people (including talent that had worked on the movie) asking if the figure was available to buy. I informed them that, sadly, it was purely digital...

A few weeks later, Empire magazine were contacted by Universal who wanted to know if we could actually make some 'real' figures.

I had recently purchased a 3D resin printer and had been running some tests to bring some of my digital characters into the real world, so I started cleaning up my 3D model of Ryan, and ran some test prints to see if we could make this work.

After a few failed starts I was finally able to print and assemble a full figure. The tiny Ryan isn't actually poseable (the joints remain cosmetic) but I was really happy with the results, so it was looking more and more like we could do this. Universal eventually came back and asked me to produce 20 figures, all in packaging to match my original illustration.

It quickly became clear that the scope of this work would be outside of my own time and abilities, so I turned to Product Resolutions Limited to take over the production. They took my data and printed 20 heads, torsos, legs and pairs of arms, with Luke manually cleaning up each print, priming the parts and then painting them by hand.

You can see some more in depth behind the scenes of the work they did here

For my part, I also tackled the accessories, printing, priming and hand painting a LOT of tiny hats, samurai swords and the smallest sunglasses imaginable.

While Luke from Product Resolutions was able and willing to paint the bodies of the figures, the heads were extremely fiddly due to the fine detail (and the importance of capturing Ryan's likeness), so I also painted each of these by hand.

My original design and the points of articulation were based off of a 7" figure, however for practical reasons, we had to reduce the scale of the physical ones to 4.5" as such the heads were especially small. I didn't have a drop of caffeine the entire time I worked on these!

I was also able to adapt my original 3D models of the blister packaging into printable moulds, which PRL 3D printed and then vacuum formed in-house to create the custom shells. Which was a really lovely touch.

I took the artwork from the original illustration, adapted it to create a new rear side of the pack (which was never needed for the original illustration) as well as designing and ordering a batch of custom clear backed stickers for the extra decal on the front of the blister shells.

PRL ordered the backing cards from a local printing firm and hand clipped all of the corners to match the original design.

Finally once all of the parts were complete, PRL assembled and glued everything together.

The figures have made they way into various people's hands as gifts to promote the movie. I was also invited to the special UK premiere screening a the BFI IMAX, which was SO much fun!

Finally, here's some shots of Ryan and Emily Blunt gifting one of the figures to Alison Hammond on This Morning.

I can safely say that hand painting 20 tiny Ryan Gosling heads wasn't something I ever thought I would be doing but I could not be happier with how they came out! Massive thanks to Empire, Universal and the team at PRL for all of their hard work.