Stuntman Anthony Molinari

by Chris Stewart 09.2025

Anthony Molinari, stunt performer, coordinator, and actor, starts his days with meditation and reflection. When we spoke, he was freshly back home with his wife and children following the most demanding project of his career: Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. He was thrilled and exhausted. But most of all, he was keen to talk about the magic of how some filmmakers are able to be in the moment. For him, that's Nolan's secret sauce.

“When I first did stunts for him, I didn't even know who he was. But he was special right away. I worked on a fight [in The Dark Knight Rises]. I remember thinking this guy is present. He's observing the details that are in front of him. He'll set up the playground and let people play. I've seen actors nervous to ask him to try something and Nolan says 'go for it'.”

Go for it, as a concept, is where it all began for Molinari 24 years ago in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a teacher at the time, “Mr. M.” to his students, and it had been a long year, but he felt he had finally gotten the kids in his corner. Behavior management had pulled together and it was time to take it to a new level. So, with no way of knowing how it would impact his own life, he wrote on the board: What do you want to do when you grow up?

A student threw the question right back to him. Did you know when you were ten?

“All I could think of was Lee Majors,” he told me. Specifically Lee Majors as Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy, where he played a Hollywood stunt man who, as Molinari puts it, “drove fast trucks, jumped off buildings, got the girl”. So, in some combination of buried memory and meeting his students where they were, Mr. M. said “A stunt man”.

A few days later, the student who'd thrown the question back to him approached him with some papers. It was printed information on a Stunt School.

“Where'd you get this?” Molinari asked.

“The internet, Mr. M. Get with the times.”

And get with the times he did. He's lived many lives since then. He's been a Swiss guard in Angels and Demons, the final boxing opponent facing Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter, a menacing tough in HBO's Barry, and a cop who poofs into confetti in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. 

In his first decade of work he doubled Mark Ruffalo, George Clooney, and others, along with endless other credits. You've seen him in Westworld, in Abbott Elementary in Perry Mason, in Licorice Pizza, both doubling actors during stunts, and in acting roles. He has nearly 200 credits to his name and is a three-time Screen Actors Guild (SAG) nominee for stunt ensemble work in Star Trek (2009), The Amazing Spider-Man (2013) and Ford V Ferrari (2020).

His career has been marked by repeated collaborations, and talking with him, it's not hard to see why. Affable, effusive, and full of praise for the people he's worked with, he continually comes back to the concept of groundedness. It's clear that he wants to be on sets with people who work on a human level, treat the crew as a team, and are focused on being in the moment. 

“It's all about the now. I mean it's all about the now,” he tells me. He remembers an early gig on the set of The West Wing when he noticed that Martin Sheen, even if he were being called to his mark, would finish talking to a crew member, caterer, or building staff – whose names he always remembered.

Aside from the fact that he's honed an incredibly skilled, careful, and rigorous methodology when it comes to stunt work, he finds joy in the process. In an interview with The Wrap about Barry, Bill Hader called Molinari “the nicest guy on the planet”.

For Molinari, the key is to get back up when you're down.

“I was just thinking about it,” he tells me, “Failure equals winning. The more and more you fail, you succeed. That's your path to success.”

I mention that this seems to fit with the nature of stunt work. You go down, over and over, and get up again. It's not failing in that case, of course, but it is the art of tenacity and of being the guy who can try something for the director that may or may not work, take the insight from it, improve it, and go again.

I ask him about the announcement of a stunt Oscar category beginning in 2028 which he sees as positive but not quite the point. 

“I don't like attention, I'm not a big attention guy. l see the old school side of stunts which is shhh, we are the magic trick of movies...but then there are people who feel, hey, we're an integral part of movies, we should get acknowledgment. And I see that side, too.”

Films, in their final form, are workplaces for hundreds of craftspeople, technicians, engineers, food service workers, on-set tutors, electricians, puppeteers, drivers, animal wranglers, people who specialize in painting scars or designing contact lenses.

Molinari has always been happy to be part of the pack. But having gone from teacher to stunt performer, to coordinator, to occasional actor, he's ready to turn it around and give voice to up-and-coming talent: the teacher in him – and the Worcester in him – coming through.

We end there: with what's next.

“I'm putting together a team of producers and we're gonna go out there and tell inspiring stories, that's what we're up to right now.”

What's the main drive of these projects, I ask? What moves something higher on the slate?

Molinari smiles, and I should have seen the answer coming from a mile away.

“The message,” he says. “It's always gotta be the message.”