Peacemaker: James Gunn Says Explosive Stunt Had Producer Convinced Someone Died

Production continues on James Gunn's upcoming HBO Max original DC series Peacemaker, and the director took to Twitter to reveal the details of an explosive stunt conducted on set and the terrifying aftermath that befell on one crew member. In a tweet, Gunn wrote: "Last night we exploded a building and a dummy was standing in the doorway and for a full five seconds our producer, Simon, who didn't know the dummy was a dummy, thought we accidentally killed a guy. I'm not kidding." In a follow-up, Gunn added: "It's the hardest I've laughed since the beginning of the pandemic and I laughed just as hard this morning when I told Jenn."

One fan in the replies asked Gunn if he'd seen a similar moment that happened on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, when director George Miller feared for a brief moment that star Nicholas Hoult had seemingly been crushed to death during a stunt. The good news is that it was a dummy of Hoult's character, like in Gunn's Peacemaker stunt, but the entire thing is seen in the behind-the-scenes footage of the 2015 movie, embedded below.

Last night we exploded a building and a dummy was standing in the doorway and for a full five seconds our producer, Simon, who didn’t know the dummy was a dummy, thought we accidentally killed a guy. I’m not kidding. 😂 #Peacemaker

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 5, 2021

Safety with major stunts like this is always the first concern on major productions like Fury Road or Peacemaker, but moments of confusion like this do happen. Even on Mission: Impossible - Fallout there was a time when the crew of the film briefly thought series star Tom Cruise hadn't made it out of a stunt alive. Director Christopher McQuarrie previously told Yahoo! that while filming the movie's climactic helicopter sequence there was a time where multiple parties thought Cruise had fatally fallen.

"We heard two grips on the radio saying, 'We just lost Tom!' There were people on the ground who were clearly not in on what we were doing. They thought his climbing was the stunt, and when they saw him fall, they thought we'd gone off page a little bit."

Luckily for Cruise and all of us, that wasn't the case, and luckily for Gunn and his DC series, star John Cena did not blow-up in a building last night while filming the upcoming series.