You may not recognize Clay Donahue Fontenot, but if you’ve seen a Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes or Jamie Foxx movie over the past 15 years, you’ve most likely been dazzled by his skill set.
Fontenot is a stuntman. A unique breed of men and women on a movie set, that work behind the action, putting their safety and sometimes their lives on the line during the production and filming of a movie.
Their stunts, or gags, are usually intended for use in motion pictures or dramatized television. Fontenot’s raw determination and boss-level work ethic has propelled him into rare air.
According to Business Insider, he is one of the 12 most sought-after stunt doubles in Hollywood.
With a body of work that’s been as solid as a rock, Fontenot has been the unsung hero in some of the biggest action blockbusters in the past two decades. They include films such as “Iron Man,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” “Unstoppable,” and all three “Blade” movies.
He was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida.
BlackEnterprise.com caught up with Fontenot to discuss how he got involved with what is obviously a dangerous, though ultimately rewarding career.
Fontenot says he started seriously thinking about getting into the film business shortly after high school but thought it was a goal that was unattainable for a “small-time, small-town” guy in Florida.
One day, while watching television, everything changed. “A girl that I escorted to the prom was starring on a TV show, and I figured at that point, if she could do it, I could do it. So three months later I saved money, packed all my things, and moved to California to be in the business.”
It was an impulsive—some might think reckless—move that ultimately paid off, but at the time, Fontenot wasn’t sure which way the cards would fall.
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His Jamie Foxx movie collaborations include, “Django Unchained“and “The Amazing Spiderman 2” which is already playing in theaters. Another movie, “Horrible Bosses,” will reportedly start playing in theaters this fall.
For Fontenot, jumping off buildings or planes or trains or automobiles, running on top of moving trains, sliding underneath moving cars, flipping and crashing cars and falling off speeding motorcycles are all just another day at the office.
It’s the job—something a majority of actors and movie stars are unable to do, even if they wanted to, because of insurance liabilities.
Actors that commit to a major movie project are required to sign insurance policies that govern and restrict their activity during the duration of the filming. If there are any mishaps on set, production shuts down. As imagined, it increases production overhead, driving up costs.
Most traditional film insurance packages will not cover stunts or gags. That’s when the stunt world takes center stage to do the heavy lifting—a peculiar arrangement of need and supply.
“They hire us to do the performing. When it’s either a profile shot or it’s shot from the back, or from the side or if you look enough like your double, a lot of times they would shoot you straight on,” Fontenot explains. “On Django, I did a lot of the horseback stuff. I also did a fight sequence between two Mandingo slave fighters. I’m the guy who got killed. Dying is one of my specialties. It helps me make a fantastic living.”
Although there have been some close shaves, two particular gags stand out to Fontenot as the craziest and most nerve-wracking respectively.
“I recently worked on R.I.P.D with Ryan Reynolds, and I did a pretty good car turnover in that with a cannon. They put a cannon in the car and a button in the
driver’s hand, and we drove through a mark. When we pushed the button, the cannon fired and flipped the car through the air. The movie didn’t do too well, but it was a really good gag.”Fontenot also describes a more chilling kind of danger.
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“Anytime you work with fire, that’s a pretty dangerous deal. If something were to go wrong or you got burned, it’s one of the only things that you cannot recover from 100%,” he says. “One of my more challenging gags was the rope swing in “US Marshals.” I had to swing 18 stories high and land on a moving train. If I landed short I could have fallen to my death. If I had bounced, I would have rolled off the train and landed on the tracks and gotten electrocuted.”
Fontenot says he calls his wife and two little daughters before starting a dangerous stunt. He tells them he loves them before he goes into stuntman mode.
“I guess you could say I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie though not the way you think.
Being a stunt man makes me one of the safest individuals on the planet,” he adds. “I don’t drive fast because I have a race car. I can get all of that out at the racetrack or I get those thrills at work. But I think what motivates me is to be the absolute best that I can be.”Fontenot is currently working on the latest installment of the “Fantastic Four“ franchise. He’s the stunt double for Michael B. Jordan’s character Johnny Storm. Storm, aka the Human Torch, is Caucasian in the Marvel Comics universe. The new twist to this reboot, casting Jordan as a black Human Torch, is an intriguing plot point.
Fontenot says he “can’t divulge much about the project until it comes out, except that it’s going well.”
But he does take a couple of moments to comment about renowned poet and author, Maya Angelou, who died Wednesday.
“She was an inspiration to everyone I know and God rest her soul. She was a beautiful, beautiful person, and I thank her for all that she’s given us. She gave us a huge gift,” Fontenot says.