October 27, 2015
In The Mix

The Fast Picture Show

Crashing cars and blowing things up is in Eric Norris's blood.

Craig Tomashoff

Last week at work, Eric Norris had some folks pushed out of a plane flying at 15,000 feet — and only one had a parachute.

This week, he’s going to smash two Jeeps speeding through the desert. Next week — fingers crossed — he’ll be crashing two speeding police cars on a busy city street.

Most people would be locked away for this. However, as the stunt coordinator for the new NBC series The Player — starring Wesley Snipes and Philip Winchester — Norris may well earn a bonus for dreaming up new ways to destroy things. As the youngest son of actor and karate champ Chuck Norris, he can’t help it.

“My whole childhood, I wanted to do this kind of stuff,” says Norris, who nabbed his first Emmy nomination this summer, for stunt coordination on FX’s Sons of Anarchy. “I’m not sure I was an adrenaline junkie, but I saw what my dad was doing when he started acting, and it looked like a lot of fun.”

Norris got his start in stunts during his early 20s, working on his dad’s movies, like Invasion U.S.A. and Hero and the Terror. After branching out as a stuntman in films (including Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and The Mummy Lives) he became the stunt coordinator as well as a director on his father’s hit series, Walker, Texas Ranger.

“What I remember most was a stunt I did involving a car crash. The car was engulfed in flames, and I ended up in an ambulance. As we were driving to the hospital, my dad came out of his trailer, pulled the ambulance aside, got in and told me I could stunt coordinate and direct, but he didn’t want to see me get hurt.”

As for The Player, Norris — who also competes in NASCAR racing — is enthusiastic about the show’s excitement factor. “We just had a meeting about having somebody on a motorcycle pull up to our good guy’s car and try to shoot the woman inside,” he explains.

“But we would have the hero T-bone the bike to take it out. My brain is already thinking of cool ways we can do that. This really is the best job in the world.”

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