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“My Toenails Were Rotting Away... But the Real Horror Was What Doctors Never Told Me”

📍By Melissa Rowe, 48 | WellnessTodayOnline Contributor | Manchester, UK
If you’d told me two years ago I’d be crying in a shoe shop because of my feet, I would’ve
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But that’s exactly where I hit rock bottom.
It was July. A heatwave. I saw the perfect pair of sandals. I reached for them. And then I
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By Killian Faith-KellyPublished: 25 April 2025

A s a stunt coordinator, Jude Poyer doesn’t always get asked to do interviews about his films. But that’s the gig: design enormously elaborate sequences that attract and amaze audiences, then watch as the limelight is trained entirely on actors and directors while you receive little to nothing by way of public praise.

That was never going to happen with Havoc. It’s going out on Netflix. It stars Tom Hardy (he plays Walker, a battle-scarred detective who has to find a prominent politician’s son before a group of not-so-well-wishing Triads beat him to it), and MMA legend-turned-actress Michelle Waterson. It’s directed by action aficionado Gareth Evans, and, most importantly, it features big, flashy sequences laden with intricate, elaborate stunt work that’s completely integral to the plot of the film.

As Hardy’s Walker wades his way through his city’s illicit underworld, there are plenty of people trying to get in his way – that means plenty of fights and, this being a Gareth Evans film, those fights were never going to be subtle, low-key affairs. Poyer’s work is very much at the centre of the film – so we sat down with him to talk through how he and Evans designed those action sequences, working with Tom Hardy, and his personal favourite stunts in the film.

Men’s Health: A lot of the stunt work in this film looks incredibly complicated and intricate – what was your process for designing the choreography of those stunts with director Gareth Evans?

Jude Poyer: When we work together, the first thing we talk about is character and story, and then we look at sequences. So with characters, how does this person move? What is their background? Have they been in a situation like this before? What is their objective in this scene? What do we want the audience to feel or learn across this scene? And then we explore the movement and we start choreographing very specifically, to find the story of the fight, and the different movements and stunt gags.

MH: So how did the answers to those questions for Tom Hardy’s character Walker influence the movements you’d choreograph for him?

JP: It would be bizarre if Walker did lots of beautiful high kicks, for example. It’s conceivable that an American cop could do that, but it might be distracting and it might make the audience question, ‘why are they moving like that?’ Whereas if you have a character like the one played by Michelle Waterson, her character is an assassin, and she’s from East Asia, so it’s conceivable that she has learned a lot of different martial arts. Walker’s style is a bit more brawly and a bit more aggressive, and it’s direct. There’s a sense of urgency to his story, so he’s going to do whatever he has to do in that moment to achieve his objective, and it’s probably not going to look pretty, and it may hurt, but it’s about getting there.

MH: Is there anything about the fact that he’s being played by a guy with a martial arts background, in Tom Hardy, that changes the stunts you design for him?

JP: Tom’s done jiu-jitsu to quite a high level, he’s done boxing, so of course we know he’s comfortable within those movements and he’s familiar with them, but that doesn’t mean that Walker is into jiu-jitsu, and it would have potentially looked quite boring if in the nightclub sequence he was doing single-leg and double-leg takedowns and flying arm bars to everybody. So story and character came first, but we knew he could be trusted, because he can move and he understands the mechanics of the body in a fight sequence to carry out that choreography in a very convincing way.

It also helped with his jiu-jitsu background that he knew of Michelle Waterson. When they weren’t shooting or rehearsing, they were training together, and they became friendly, so when it came time for them to fight, there was a trust. That pays off on screen, because when two performers trust each other, they can go that little bit harder.

MH: What specific advantages does his martial arts background give Hardy as an actor?

JP: Sometimes you work with actors that don’t have any kind of combat background and you have to explain in minute detail exactly what a move is, but Tom doesn’t need to learn what a right hook is. Tom throws a good right hook. Or at the beginning of the nightclub scene, one of the corrupt policemen takes out a telescopic truncheon and goes for Walker, and Walker puts him in a four-figure lock, which is a kind of arm lock. If you have to teach that to someone who’s never seen that before, they become all fingers and thumbs. But because of his jiu-jitsu background, Tom knows exactly what a four-figure lock, how to put it on and how to make it look convincing.

For me as a stunt coordinator, let’s face it – very few movie fights are realistic. But I want them to feel like fights.

MH: That nightclub scene is pretty astonishing – do you have any personal favourite moment from it, or bits you’re most proud of?

JP: There’s a bit where Walker springs into action, slides along the floor and sweeps the legs off a Triad that’s running towards Mia, and that was partly inspired by a shot in Jackie Chan’s Police Story, which is a seminal classic Hong Kong film. In that sequence at the end of Police Story, there’s a big fight at a shopping mall which involves a lot of glass being broken – we break a lot of glass in this sequence.

MH: Does the music in that scene affect the stunts within it? Are you coordinating them to the beat of the music?

JP: Yeah. Gareth often writes or gets inspired when he’s doing his scripting by certain tracks of music. He had a particular piece of music in mind for that nightclub sequence, so when he did his pre-vis (in which different shots in a scene are planned out and sometimes shot in a much more rudimentary way than in the film, too see how they work together) he had the music track on, so he knew at which points in the music he wanted the cuts to happen.

There are a lot of comparisons between music and dance, and fight choreography – or there should be. For me as a stunt coordinator, let’s face it – very few movie fights are realistic. But I want them to feel like fights. And in a movie like Havoc, I want the audience to feel that those characters have bad intentions towards one another. The rhythms are so, so important for doing that.

My inspirations, and some of Gareth’s inspirations, are Hong Kong filmmakers, people like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hong. Before they were stunt performers and choreographers, they were in the Beijing Opera. The Beijing Opera is singing, it’s dancing, it’s acrobatics and it’s fighting – and it’s performed to percussion. So one of the reasons why Jackie Chan and Sammo Hong and those Hong Kong filmmakers’ action stands out is it’s very, very rhythm-based. Not just in terms of performing to a rhythm, but the moments when they choose to break from the rhythm. That’s something Gareth is very, very aware of, so when we choreograph, we think about those rhythms. Sometimes my team and I will present maybe a 15-move sequence of punches and blocks and knife swings to Gareth, and he’ll look at it and go, ‘Yep, yep, yep – but can I just have one more move here,’ or ‘Those two punches, can we just have a third one on the end of it?’ Because he’s thinking in terms of the rhythms.

Inside Havoc‘s Memorable Nightclub Sequence

Havoc’s most impressive stunt sequence takes place in a nightclub. Amid pulsing music and flashing lights, you’ve got Walker, his suspect colleagues, dozens of Triads, and the girlfriend of the guy they’re all trying to find. They’ve all got different motivations, but the one thing that unites them is a desire and ability to do some serious harm to one another. It was a scene that required careful choreography. Poyer explains how he put the sequence together?

Hong Kong Weaponry

Hong Kong movies were a big inspiration for Havoc. That comes down to the kind of weapons that they use – Gareth and I showed the art department the kind of knives that Triad people use, in both movie stills but also police photographs, and then the art department would replicate those weapons out of rubber or foam.

Safety First

We spent weeks shooting the nightclub sequence, so a special set was constructed in a studio. The ceilings of that studio were quite low, so some of the stunts that ordinarily we might have used safety cables or safety wires for, we couldn’t. We had to be a bit more creative in finding the safe solutions to looking after our cast and our stunt performers.

Shattering Expectations

We could get away with having glass floors, which meant that we were able to show the perspective of someone hitting that floor and have the camera traveling under and seeing them slide along the floor, their head impacting it and the blood. And the camera can shoot through the glass, so it gave us an interesting camera perspective that you don’t ordinarily see.

Bottle Service

It also allowed us to have tables with glasses on them that could be knocked over or smashed. We have Mia pick up an ice bucket with a champagne flute in it at one point, and she uses the bucket on one person and the bottle on someone else.