The Fall Guy star Ryan Gosling has revealed his most terrifying stunt as he continues on the publicity trail for his Australian-shot movie.

The film, which is about a Hollywood stuntman and set in Australia, features several death-defying stunts.

Gosling, director David Leitch and Logan Holladay – one of four stuntmen for Gosling on The Fall Guy – discussed the importance of the stunts in an interview with GQ magazine.

They include a 12-storey tumble for Gosling’s character, Colt Seavers.

“The reason I put on these sunglasses is because I had to hide my fear. There’s no reason for me to have sunglasses as I fall backwards into whatever the shot is,” said Gosling, who performed more stunts on the red carpet for the movie’s US premiere on Wednesday.

“They were really great with me because they knew I had this fear of heights, but I wanted to do it – I mean I tried to get out of it a million times, but [Leitch] wouldn’t let me.

“In the end I understood that I needed to do it. It was an opportunity to sort of get a little bit of a sliver of the experience that [stunt people] have every day what [they] go through.”

Holladay said stuntmen and women were often scared at work.

“That’s how we feel a lot of times doing this stuff. It’s not that it’s not scary, it’s always scary. You just need to take the right precautions. You have the experience for it,” he said.

Queensland stunt co-ordinator Keir Beck was a key part of the team for The Fall Guy, which is also a tribute to under-appreciated stunt performers and the lost art of some old-school stunts.

Gosling did several of his stunts for The Fall Guy, including one where he fights baddies while skidding across Sydney Harbour Bridge, using a spade to hang on to a skip bin.

“That was not something you could really practise, obviously, because we couldn’t get access to the bridge, and we only had access for like an hour,” he said recently.

For the harbour bridge stunt, Beck was in the back of the skip truck hidden under a blanket, monitoring ropes and pulleys controlling the wires attached to Gosling to keep him safe.

Beck said the production was committed to real-world stunts with real people – and that meant no fewer than 50 stunt drivers, as well as shutting down the bridge to film eight takes of skip bin madness.

In another sequence filmed on a Sydney beach, Holladay broke the world record for cannon rolls, rolling a Jeep 8½ times.

Beck grew up watching The Fall Guy on television and dreaming of being a stunt performer – he got his experience with heights and ropes working as an arborist, and rock climbing and mountaineering.

After bumping into an old school friend working in stunts he resolved to get into the industry. Within three weeks he was working on the set of Pitch Black with Vin Diesel.

That was 26 years ago, when doing stunts involved plenty of bravado. These days, he said, it was often about making things look dangerous while ensuring they were extremely safe, he said.

“It probably will be a bit of a letdown for an audience to hear this, but stunts aren’t as bad or as dangerous as they look, depending on what you’re doing,” Beck said.

The one caveat was getting hit by a car … which was still getting hit by a car, he said.

The Fall Guy is in cinemas.

-with AAP