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The Expanse Actors Detail Their Most Dangerous On-Set Incidents

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The Expanse’s Steven Strait and Wes Chatham detailed the most dangerous stunts they’ve ever been a part of on the show during a revealing conversation at New York Comic Con 2021.

“So, there was like a, what do they call it? A cherry picker rig, and there’s this enormous light, and they had gotten this camera that was like super, super, super slow motion,” Strait shared during a panel attended by CBR. “I think they originally developed it to film the way bombs explode so they could capture things in milliseconds? So, they have this camera going and this enormous light, and I’m way up in the air with the stunt guy with nothing on.”


The actor, who portrays Captain James Holden in the series, further explained that the stunt he was doing consisted of him “jumping naked backward off this thing in the middle of Toronto” from a rig called “Jumbo” — which was especially scary because the rig measured about 70 feet tall.

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“It was like an enormous fall? I jump off, and we’d have to capture a single moment to where they would use it. It doesn’t look like I’m falling, but that’s how we did that. So, we did that for like a day,” he continued. “I hit the balloon mat that firefighters use, and I’d roll off and go to video village and I would look at the playback to make sure that what we were doing was working and I was like, ‘Okay, I got my leg here’ and ‘It’s got to be this way.” I go back up and I jump off again and it was hilarious and bizarre, but like an experience I’ll never, ever forget.”

Later in the panel, Strait’s co-star Wes Chatham — who portrays Amos Burton — admitted that his own sketchiest stunt also involved “Jumbo,” explaining, “I can’t remember what episode or I think it might have been Season 3, but it was a scene where I’m weightless and I’m going down between the hull of the Rocinante and there’s a fire, something I got to fix, or a leak or something when we’re in the middle of a battle, and Breck Eisner was directing.”

Chatham joked that the majority of his life-threatening experiences on set have taken place under the guidance of Eisner, noting, “They made these massive walls that represented the hull of the Rocinante — and I’m going to be floating down — so he wanted me to float down upside down into the hull.”

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“The spacesuits weigh a ton. The helmet is massive. And so, I was up in the rafters in Jumbo and it is so — like, once you get past the lighting, when you’re up past the lighting, it’s just darkness,” he continued. “And when they flipped me upside down, I didn’t know at the time, but the weight of the helmet going upside-down cut my mic off so you couldn’t hear me… So I go to the top of the rafters. I’m sitting up there and then something happened with the steam coming out of the pipe and [Breck’s] like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ and then they were working on it, and I was sitting there just swinging, just by myself with the cobwebs.”

Chatham realized he might be in a bit of trouble when he noticed that all the blood in his body seemed to be rushing to his head, and he apparently didn’t have a way to communicate to the crew below.

“And then I started getting a little loopy, and they completely forgot about me. I was up there hanging in the rafters and I thought, ‘Is this how I’m gonna die?'” he recalled. “And then, ‘If I die, who are they gonna cast as Amos? Like, going forward? And I just started thinking of like, ‘Well, he would be good Amos.'”

After what felt like several minutes, Eisner finally remembered that the actor was hanging in the rafters and literally brought him back down to Earth. “And so they bring me down and I survived,” Chatham concluded. “I might not have as many brain cells as I once had, but I survived.”

Season 6 of The Expanse premieres Dec. 10 on Amazon Prime Video.

KEEP READING: The Expanse’s Final Season Is a Love Letter to Fans

Source: New York Comic Con

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