When to Hold Tight and When to Let Go

Professional stunt performer and driver Richard Marrero has been in Marvel films and award-winning TV shows, but sometimes a creative life also means life of uncertainty. This is how he keeps going.

It starts with a breakfast burrito.

Years ago, my longtime writer-friend Carly Miller-Marrero mentioned a film project her husband, Richard Marrero, was hoping to be working on soon. She didn’t use any proper nouns, but shared that Richard might be stunt doubling an actor that he would be excited to work with. But of course, she said, you never know with these things.

I was used to her sharing both excitement and doubt in vague ways over the last 15+ years we’ve been friends. I’ve never pried, knowing things often had to be secret because of the way the industry worked, but also because I’d come to know that holding things loosely was how you survived the uncertainty of making a living in entertainment.

But this time, Carly went on, explaining more about why they rarely say what Richard is working on before the job was done: “As Richard says, it isn’t real until he’s eating a breakfast burrito on set.”

I learn later that Richard adopted this saying from a stunt coordinator he worked with early on in his career; the coordinator shared the saying as a kind of survival skill, a way to help Richard not feel bad or take it personally when things fell through at the very last minute, as they often did – like a scene being cut, or showing up to set only to be told you weren’t needed anymore.

Richard Marrero has been working as a professional stunt driver since 2003, and has to date worked on films like Avengers: Infinity War and TV series like Stranger Things.

 But the last 20 years haven’t been easy, and there were many times when Richard thought about turning around, trying something else, especially when his imposter syndrome kicked in and he wondered if someone like him could really make a living doing something like that.

Even though we’d been friends for over 15 years, I actually knew very little about Richard’s career outside of his IMDb profile, or the few times I’d seen him on my TV screen, driving fast down narrow streets, getting shot, or getting a stake driven through his face (he played a zombie as part of The Walking Dead). There was also that time I saw him perform beneath the hot Florida sun as part of a Disney stunt show. But we’re friends, so when we’re together, we don’t talk much about work.

Richard’s stunt acting reel

But I never forgot about the breakfast burrito. So recently, while I was in Atlanta for work, I stayed the night with Carly and Richard and sat on their couch and asked Richard questions for two hours, mostly about what has helped him endure such an uncertain industry for the last twenty years. I also asked him about the burrito.

But first, we head out for some fry bread.

“Hiding behind cows.”

Even though I grew up in the south, I somehow had never heard of fry bread, so when, as we sit down for dinner in a blue booth inside the Atlanta oyster bar and restaurant BeetleCat and Richard joyfully recommends the appetizer, I’m intrigued. I love bread. I love fried things. What could go wrong?

But honestly, even if he’d recommended wasabi-covered watercress (two of the only foods I dislike), I probably still would have wanted to try it, pulled in by his almost boyish excitement, a kind of joy I sometimes worry I’m losing.

 The waiter comes to our table and Richard orders two fry breads for the three of us. We sip our ice waters and wait for the bread, surrounded by large windows, light pouring through and reflecting off the silver drop lamps above. Richard and Carly glow, but not just because of the windows. Carly, a writer, activist, and former social worker, has creamy skin and her long light blonde hair falls wavy and naturally down her back. She doesn’t wear much makeup, but together she and Richard, with his big smile and dark short curly hair that somehow manages to look polished and casual all at the same time, look like they could walk right out of BeetleCat and onto a red carpet, despite their casual jeans and t-shirts.

We spend our time at the table like most of our times together, laughing. Richard is quiet but effervescent, and Carly’s crystalline blue eyes widen when she laughs. The light shifts as we near sunset, and the waiter brings us two perfectly round gleaming fry breads.

As soon as I take my first bite, I understand. It’s light and melty with just the right amount of oil and salt and seasonings; I still think about it all the time. But what I remember most is how Richard savored it, and how much joy he seemed to get out of the fact that I loved it too. But not like a parent and kid on Christmas morning, but more as if we were the siblings, together unwrapping something we loved equally.

Richard has a way of making people remember what it feels like to be happy.

I noticed the effect when we first arrived at the restaurant and he stopped his black four-door Tesla in the middle of the parking garage. We all got out and watched him use his phone as a remote control to back his car into a very tight and complicated space; his mood reminded me of the smile my three-year-old nephew gets when he plays with his remote-control car, only Richard doesn’t crash his into a kitchen island but guides it perfectly into the spot. Richard has a calmness about him in everything he does, in fact, something that I might not have guessed about a stunt performer had I not known him. While you might guess someone who does that kind of work might be wild or hyper or intense, Richard is none of those things. He’s calm, precise, kind, and the kind of person who I’d guess has never raised his voice at another human being.

 After dinner, I take home a BeetleCat matchbook as a souvenir. We walk back through the towering bright blue front doors of the restaurant and make a left down a few stairs into an alcove that leads to the parking garage, abutted by a few other shops. As we pass through the outdoor tables, two women sitting there eating gelato see us, light up, and stand up.

After a lot of hugs (they hug me too) and laughter, I find out that the two women are old friends of Richard’s from past films and shows they’ve worked on together. The women had just gotten fresh hair-cuts nearby, and they were all so excited to have run into each other so randomly; for once, not on a set. They spend the next few minutes laughing and catching each other up on their lives.

 Without meaning to, we all kind of make a circle in the covered walkway between BeetleCat and the parking garage, and pass around stories as if there is an invisible campfire in the middle. One of the women shares that she  recently got married to a stunt guy whom she first met when they worked together on the pilot for Watchmen: he was a “bad guy,” she says, who had to try to “shoot” her character during a night scene, which included her running away from him and “hiding behind cows in a field.”

Eventually everyone hugs goodbye (they hug me again too), and Richard, Carly, and I head back to the car where Richard uses his phone to back it out of the tight spot so we can all get in and drive back to their house.

On the drive, I learn that the women who just hugged me are stunt doubles to some of my favorite Marvel characters. The woman who recently got married, I learn, is CC Ice, the stunt double for Elizabeth Olsen, aka Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff.

 CC and I later become friends on Instagram, and I ask her if she minds if I include her and her cow story in this profile. She kindly agrees, and shares the follow up about how while she first met her now-husband during the cow scene on Watchmen, they fell in love, she says, on the battlefields of Wakanda, during their work on Avengers: Endgame. She was the stunt double for Olsen, and he was one of the stunt doubles for Captain America.

Carly and Richard, however, did not meet on a set. They met in high school, and have been together over 26 years, and married for 18.  Once we get back to their charming two-story house located in leafy Edgewood, surrounded by blue hydrangeas, Richard parks and we walk up the patio steps and pad into the living room. Carly lights a candle on the wooden coffee table and we all sit on their buttery-soft cream sectional sofa, surrounded by light blue pillows. With their fluffy sweet rescue dog Roger on the rug at our feet, Richard tells me about his career, and how it can be traced back to what happened in high school.

“A single air mattress on the floor.”

Richard spent a lot of his childhood jumping over his living room couch and watching Jackie Chan movies, dreaming of being just like him one day.

In high school, he loved playing the “goofy sidekick detective” in a play. But deep down he didn’t really think he could have a job doing stunt work and acting. So when he was given an assignment to find a career mentor, he felt a little lost. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, especially because what he really wanted to do seemed kind of impossible.

But during a conversation with a trusted teacher, Richard shared honestly why he was behind on finding a mentor, and told her that deep down he was interested in acting and stunt work, but that he didn’t know anyone whom he could find as a mentor. That kind of job also just didn’t seem accessible to him then. He was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the US when he was two years old; he’d lived in Central Florida his whole life, and the film industry seemed a million miles away.

But his teacher didn’t see it that way.

She listened, and while she didn’t know of any mentors he could ask either, she did know about some other students who were making a film, a live action version of a video game they loved, Double Dragon.

She connected them, and Richard acted and did stunt work for that student film. “We came together with all our interests,” he says, “to make this thing, and it was awesome.” The movie, he laughs, wasn’t “good,” but, what was awesome was that they did it. They made a thing together. And other people noticed.

Richard and his friends held a student premiere showing at the local AMC theater in Celebration, Florida, and family and friends showed up to support them, including his girlfriend Carly and some of her family members. Richard loved making that film, and he thought seeing it on a big screen was really cool. But he still didn’t think he could get a job in film. So instead, after high school, he enrolled in community college and decided to pursue a career in another interest, computer animation.

But college classes, like high school, were a struggle for him. Carly sits up and leans forward a little as she explains to me how once she tried to edit a compare and contrast essay Richard wrote in high school, comparing the Big Mac and the Whopper. They both laugh as she explains how she couldn’t even edit it because it was so bad. She advised him to write it over. She doesn’t recount this cruelly, and it’s evident by Richard’s smile that they both don’t ascribe worth or talent to any particular school-related judgment. Perhaps it’s because they know being “bad” in one area doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of being incredible in another.

But back then, no matter how hard Richard tried or how long he studied for a test, he couldn’t seem to thrive in that environment. And when he realized it would take another two years before he could take classes in what really interested him, he decided college wasn’t what he wanted to do and started exploring other options.

That’s when Carly’s uncle, who worked in the entertainment industry and knew Richard was trying to figure out what to do next with his life, told Richard that the film Too Fast, Too Furious was about to film in Miami, Florida. Carly’s uncle had seen Richard’s passion for performance during high school, and wanted to help Richard move forward. He helped him get a job as a production assistant on the second unit for the Miami shoot for Too Fast, Too Furious, and then another family member offered to let Richard live in the Miami house they were renovating during that three months of shooting.

That house, Carly laughs, was still under construction. “It wasn’t even like a bedroom I had,” Richard says, “it was like a little air mattress. A single air mattress on the floor.” But he was so grateful for the free room and the chance to get closer to a dream.

During those three months, Richard spent his nights blocking off roads to make sure no one came onto set accidentally during racing scenes, and spent his days trying to make his room dark enough so he could sleep.

He loved it.

“It was wild,” he says, “just seeing the different cars, and the amount of cars they had.” For the main characters’ cars, he explains there are a few versions at any given time, mostly as backup in case one wrecks. There’s  also one car that’s considered the “hero car,”  the one they use to shoot interiors with the actors. And then there’s also the stunt car version, where the inside is “not as pretty,” but built especially for safety and stunts, with components like reinforced steel and a roll cage, keeping the stunt driver safe even if the car flips.

Richard was also blown away by how many people it took to create one scene, and how much time is required. He remembers how it took two long weeks to shoot one five-minute scene. During those long nights working the Too Fast, Too Furious job, Richard met stunt drivers and stunt coordinators, many who also lived in Florida, since many projects tend to hire locally when filming on location. One stunt coordinator on set, Grady Bishop, invited Richard to take his one-day driving course. While courses like that can be expensive, Grady invited Richard to take it for free. (I can only imagine that he, like Carly’s uncle, saw in Richard what I saw when he told me about the fry bread.)

Richard jumped at the chance to take the course, and there he learned about and took more classes, like ones on learning camera angles, how to do stunt fights, how to act, how to fall. He had no trouble in those classes, like that time Grady took Richard to an open parking lot across the street from where they were filming one day and had Richard drive his own car, a 1986 white Firebird, up to a gallon water jug on the ground and stop as close to it as possible without knocking it over. In another test, while in the passenger seat, Grady would instruct Richard to slowly accelerate the car straight, but then Grady would pull the e-brake without Richard knowing it just to see how he would react. Richard was calm, and kept the car straight the whole time. “That was the final test,” Richard says, “and Grady said, ‘Ok, I think we could use you. Good job.’”

Richard was then hired to do some stunts for a short film. And because of all of his training, and all of those courses, he was ready.

“Can I really make a living off of this?”

For the next few years, Richard took whatever stunt jobs he could get, mostly commercials and indie films (often getting them by referrals), and he worked odd jobs to make ends meet, like his stint at the now-closed themed restaurant in Orlando, Jungle Jim’s.

 But there were many times he wondered if this was the right direction for his life. “I would think,” he says, “can I really make a living off of this?”

Sometimes he still wondered if he should go back to school and study computer animation.

But then Grady Bishop, the guy who’d invited Richard to take the driving course, hired Richard to help him with a live-action driving stunt show he was working to help bring to life in a 5,000-seat stadium in Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando. Richard was part of the team that opened the Lights, Motors, Action! stunt show in Disney World in 2005, and he did stunt driving for that show for thousands of people every day until the show closed in 2016.

For 12 years, Richard performed stunt driving almost every day. He also led the creation of an internal online stunt training program that was even adopted by the team at The Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular show in the same park. But when he learned in 2015 that Lights, Motors, Action! would close the following year, Richard had to decide what to do next.

There weren’t a lot of full-time jobs like that in the stunt industry, and the film work in Florida had all but dissipated due to changing rules. Should he pick up his life in Florida and try to make it in the TV and film industry somewhere else?  He’d still been working short-term stunt jobs during his time at Lights, Motors, Action!, often doing quick stints to Atlanta and back. But even if he moved, could he get enough jobs to make a living?

He didn’t know.

But this was the only career he knew, and the only one he’d ever really wanted.

He and Carly researched, and took a trip to Atlanta to look at apartments. But they still weren’t sure, especially since they’d recently bought their first house, in Florida.

But then, their friend Rachel said, “I would rent your house from you if you want to do this.” Carly explains, “We knew this was his dream, that it was still his dream.” And I know them well enough to know that the “we”  she means is more than just herself; it’s their friends, their family, everyone who believed in Richard, even when he didn’t believe in himself.

Rachel’s offer removed the final major roadblock.

“Well,” Richard remembers thinking, “I guess we’re going to do this.”

Two days after the Lights, Motors, Action! show closed in Disney World, Richard and Carly moved to Atlanta.

“I don’t think it’s time to quit yet.”

Richard already had some connections in Atlanta from the previous jobs he’d done, including the one on The Walking Dead. But the whole move, he says, “was still very scary. It was definitely a big jump because I moved to Central Florida when I was two years old and that’s all I knew. I had never lived anywhere else.”

 He’d also just lost his mom to pancreatic cancer the month before. Carly reminds him of this as he’s recalling the move, and for the first time I see both of their mouths turn down slightly. I watch the candle flicker and put my hair behind my ears and breathe, looking at them, trying to hug them with my eyes. I know that was a difficult journey with his mom, and since Carly was the one to mention it, not Richard, I decide not to ask anything more about it. Loss often penetrates the air, and usually you can tell when someone wants to breathe it in and out, or needs to let it drift away, at least for the moment.

It’s clear that the move was a tumultuous time, as if almost everything was changing at once. And now Richard was shifting from a long-term stable job in theme park entertainment to the risky and uncertain nature of television and film.

 But deep down, he says, he felt ready for this next chapter. He remembers even when he first found out Lights, Motors, Action! was closing, he wasn’t upset because, as he says, “it was almost like, Okay, here’s the kick you needed to really jump in head first into the stunt industry. This is what you want to do.”

Almost immediately after moving to Atlanta, Richard got two driving jobs: 1. Uber driver. 2. Associate at the Porsche Driving Experience Center near the Atlanta airport.

He went from driving in a popular Disney show almost every day to being a kind of chauffeur.

 He and Carly laugh as they talk about it now, especially when they remember how painful it was for Richard to just sit in the passenger seat and teach other people how to navigate the Porsche through the driving track experience, especially when those people drove incredibly slow or did not handle the car well. He was thankful for the job, but it was a special kind of torture for a professional stunt driver to just sit there and watch someone else drive.

 He loved it when the drivers asked him to switch places and demonstrate.

 When Richard wasn’t driving for Porsche or Uber, he was “hustling sets,” as he says it was called then. At the time, the way to get jobs was to literally show up to any set you’d hear about (or that you’d find simply by driving around), and ask if there was a stunt coordinator on set. If there was, you’d hand them your headshot and resume, which, Richard says, “was so awkward. I really did not like doing it.” He did it anyway.

 But two months went by, and he didn’t get any TV or film work. Carly was working remotely, and they had savings, but Richard found himself thinking once again that maybe he should do something else.

 “I remember we had a conversation around that time,” Carly says. “We were in the coffee-table-sized hallway in our tiny Cabbagetown apartment. Richard was talking about how maybe this isn’t going to work, that maybe he should just go and do something else. I remember saying to him, I don’t think you should quit. I don’t think it’s time to quit yet. “

Carly holds onto a blue pillow and continues, “I knew this was going to take time, and I had no expectation that we were going to land here and everything was going to work out. I had no illusions of that. But I did know that we were going to be okay. I knew we would figure it out. And then soon after that,” Carly says as she turns to look at Richard, “you did start getting work.”

 “I did,” he smiles.

“Drive a car backwards.”

It took another year until that work was consistent, but during the slow times, Richard focused his energy on practicing.

 For physical stunts, there are training gyms, but finding a safe place (and somewhere with enough space) to practice stunt driving is complicated. There are a few places out in LA, but at the time, there wasn’t anywhere like that to practice in Atlanta.

 Richard and fellow stunt person Kevin Waterman started researching around town, looking for locations they could possibly use. Eventually, they found a facility with land that they could safely use for practice. Kevin bought the land, and Richard bought his own stunt car.

 Richard also saw every job as a potential learning experience, like when, for his work on the film Uncle Drew in 2017, he learned how to “drive a car backwards without being able to see out of the back window,” something you can see in his reel. The back window of that bright orange van was covered, he explains, with a curtain, something that was important to keep in for the story.

Around that time he also started using his Instagram account as a kind of living demo reel that he would constantly update with new footage, so that stunt coordinators could see the most updated resume of what he could do. A lot of the actors and others he worked with also loved seeing those highlights on social media, giving them a chance to connect again, and share that work with others.

 As Richard’s skills and reel grew, so did the job offers.

From the time he moved to Atlanta in 2016 to today, he’s worked on 66 different TV and film projects, including some of my personal favorites like She-Hulk, The Florida Project, Stranger Things, Spiderman: Homecoming, and Avengers: Infinity War.

It can sound like a dangerous career, but thankfully Richard hasn’t been in any serious wrecks. Well, except for one.

“If you go to the hospital, you call.”

It happened while he was driving for a Mercedes commercial.

“We were on this curvy road,” he says, “and it was the last day of shooting. The sun was going down, and as I came around this corner, there was some gravel. I was making a left,  the gravel was on the right. I came around the corner, and the loose gravel made the car slide to the right, off the road and down this steep hill. The car rolled once.”

 This car was only meant for driving, not stunts, so it wasn’t geared up with a roll cage or reinforced steel, nor was Richard in a helmet or harness or neck brace, nor did this car have the gas tank replaced with a tiny fuel cell to prevent an explosion, all precautions taken when rolled stunts are part of the plan. This wasn’t part of the plan. Richard was driving a normal, stock Mercedes.

 But thankfully, he wasn’t injured.

As he climbed out of the now-wrecked car, all he could think about was how worried he was that this wreck would cause him to lose this job, and his good relationship with Mercedes, especially because the car he’d wrecked wasn’t even on the market yet and was one of only five made so far. “This is horrible,” he thought. “They’re going to be so mad.

“But,” he says, “it ended up being the total opposite. They were so worried about me. They were just happy I was safe. They didn’t care about the car.”

They took him to the hospital to get him checked out, and thankfully he was fine. He didn’t call Carly that night, though, afraid of worrying her, especially since he was away in Oregon. “I didn’t want her to freak out and try to fly over here or something,” he says. “And she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She would’ve been up all night.”

“But after that, we made a new rule,” Carly tells me ruefully, “that if you go to the hospital, you call.”

“Yeah,” Richard says, nodding meekly as he looks at her, smiling with his eyes.

So, I ask them, just to make sure I have it right, this was the only dangerous thing that’s ever happened to him?

“Yes,” they both say, and then we all half-joking-half not, knock on any nearby wood we can find. I think I knock with both fists.

Richard mentions that the only major injury he’s ever had to date was a broken collarbone he got after jumping off a golf cart during a water-gun fight at a music festival in 1999.

Then Carly reminds him about the sprained ankle he got at a “stunt party, jumping off of the roof.”

They explain that a “stunt party” is just what they call parties among coworkers, except in Richard’s case, those coworkers are all trained stunt professionals, so their parties tend to sometimes involve people jumping off roofs, lighting themselves on fire, jumping over fires, riding dirt bikes through the house, and shooting fireworks at each other.

Carly nonchalantly explains how once while getting a plate of food a bottle rocket passed over her head and lit some of her hair on fire. But almost as soon as it happened, as if they were on a set, someone came by and put it out immediately, without any drama.

Carly also notes that that particular misfired bottle rocket wasn’t shot off by one of the trained stunt people. Stunt people, she says, are an interesting mix of fearless but also cautious; they get adrenaline and joy from stunts, but they are also hyper-aware of how to do them safely, even when they’re at a party. “I would always notice someone was on call to keep things safe,” Carly says. “So even when they’re having fun, they’re still leaning on their training and protocol.”  Parties like these are the norm for them now, but hair-on-fire isn’t the only lifestyle adjustment they’ve had to make since Richard started working full-time TV and film.

“I’m so glad I stuck with it.”

There’s a running joke in the entertainment industry, that if you want to book a job, book a vacation.

In other words, people in the entertainment business are used to jobs changing their plans at the last minute, especially personal vacation plans.  Carly and Richard are used to their plans getting canceled. Like that time, Carly says, when they had flights booked to visit one of their best friends in China, only for Richard to get a big job at the last minute and have to cancel. Carly went to China by herself.

“It used to be devastating,” Carly says, “but now we’re just like, that’s how it goes, you know? We plan loosely and we hold things loosely.”

Now, almost everything in their calendar ends with a question mark, both the jobs Richard gets, as well as their personal plans. “It’s not easy,” Carly says, but adds that she’s learned a lot from her aunt Joyce, whose husband is also in the industry, about how to take it in stride and remember that “things can always be changed; things can always be figured out.”

Now, when those last-minute changes happen, Carly says, “it’s not the end of the world.  I think you just figure out a way to normalize it so it’s not some big drama every time plans change.”

The uncertainty is difficult, Richard agrees, but he’s glad he listened to Carly during that first year in Atlanta when he thought about quitting.  He looks at her and says how much she’s helped him keep going, especially when his imposter syndrome rang loud.

“She definitely pushes me through that,” he says, “saying like, No, you are good. You are very talented. You got this. She is a huge help, telling me I can do it. And I mean, deep down, I know I can,” he adds. “I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve gone through different challenges. But I always have that fear of being too cocky and thinking that I can do it and then messing up.”

In the last few years, Richard has been nominated for a few awards for his stunt work, including a SAG award. He, of course, doesn’t tell me this, but I find out when I go up to the guest room later that night and see the awards hidden away in the closet. As I grab an extra blanket, I also see something else framed on the wall, but it isn’t an award. I lean in closer and see it’s a kid’s drawing of Richard driving a car, something I learn later, he was given by a young boy after one of the Lights, Motors, Action! shows.

Richard says he does feel like he’s achieved the dream he had as a kid jumping off couches and watching Jackie Chan movies.  He especially felt that way when he did that stunt-double driving job for that actor Carly had told me about all those years ago: doubling Will Smith for Bad Boys for Life.

In one scene, Richard drove a 1.8 million dollar stunt car (something he and Carly are both glad no one told them until after the shoot, especially because, as Carly says, she almost spilled her smoothie in it when she was visiting set). That scene took place back where it all began for Richard: in Miami. And the car he drove for that film – a blue Porsche 911 Carrera 4S – ended up being put on display for a time in Atlanta, at the Porsche Driving Experience Center near the airport where he used to work.

If you watch the scenes of that blue porsche driving through Miami in Bad Boys for Life, you won’t see Richard’s face, but he is the one inside, racing backwards, narrowly missing a bus, driving on the same city streets he once blocked off as a production assistant almost 20 years prior.

Richard is grateful for the career he’s had so far, and hopes to keep going. But he still never counts on something until he’s eating the burrito.

“I still have a breakfast burrito every time I go to set,” he says. “A bacon and egg burrito.”

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You can learn more about Richard on his website or Instagram.