JOSH LUCAS LAUGHS OFF STUNTMAN

Poseidon star Josh Lucas was so adamant about performing his own underwater stunts where his character swims below a firey stretch of water, that after spend…

Poseidon star Josh Lucas was so adamant about performing his own underwater stunts where his character swims below a firey stretch of water, that after spending 10 hours waterlogged on set, he would go home to his pool and practice swimming laps to get in shape. The goal was to convince director Wolfgang Petersen to give the stuntman the day off.

The water became incredibly hot from the fire, so much so that the safety divers would not allow Josh to come up for air because the fire would burn him. They would be there with fins on to knock him down and stick a regulator in his mouth should he need air. rn

“A big massive pool of water is on fire and my character in a last second of realization decides to jump into the pool of fire and swim under the pool of fire with a fire hose and crawl up the wall in order to connect the two and basically do what would be a slide for life to connect the two groups. They came to me and sort of madly I said, ‘I want to do that.’ I really would love to be able to figure out a way to shoot so that you’re not using a stunt person, so that you see underneath this fire the actual person swim for a period of time. Stupidly I would go, we went to the house that had a pool and stupidly after work after being in water all day long and literally hold my breath for as long as I possibly could. I’d swim back and forth underneath the water of my pool hoping that eventually I could convince them to let me swim under this fire.”