Tina Kakadelis
Freddie Poole has been collaborating with Sylvester Stallone for fifteen years. For the past three years, they’ve been working together on Tulsa King, where Stallone plays Dwight, a mafia capo who finds himself in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after he’s released from prison. Poole is a two-time Emmy-nominated stunt coordinator for his work on the show, and served as the Second Unit Director for the recently ended third season.
TV Obsessive: I was looking at the interview we did at roughly the same time last year. Back then, we talked a lot about tone and how important that was for you when creating these sequences. If you look back on Season 3, what would you say was the defining tone for your work on Tulsa King?
Freddie Poole: In typical Tulsa King fashion, every season is bigger and bolder. That’s certainly what we did moving from Season 2 to Season 3. Tonally, it’s bigger, bolder. I always throw the same terms around: raw and visceral. I’m going to use a new one today.
Dirty. Very, very dirty, in the sense of just how raw we went with the action for Season 3.
I saw that people said this is the nastiest season of villains. What about these guys made them so nasty? Is it kind of fun for you to live in this dirty world and be the bad guy?
Well, I’ll answer that second question first. It’s most definitely a yes. Robert Patrick plays Jeremiah Dunmire as our lead villain. He does it so well and he’s so incredible to watch as he transforms into the villain. Robert and I have worked on other projects together. When the cameras aren’t rolling, he’s a hoot. The minute those cameras start, you see him switch gears and you’re like, man, I don’t like this guy.
It really gives you an opportunity to go deep from a storytelling perspective. You get to dive into that action and tell something just really raw.
What we were able to deliver on the screen was amazing and fun to put together. Of course, I had a great ensemble cast of characters. Our cast and our stunt performers who came in, we were able to utilize so many great, great stunt performers in some of these sequences.
From a more technical side of things, going back to tone and thinking about these villains, what does that mean in terms of their fighting style? How does that contrast to when you’re doing something for Stallone’s character?
They’re just very raw, right? It’s more of a brawling type of style. There’s nothing overly technical about our style. It’s not martial arts, it’s not kung fu or karate.
Even in our gunplay, when you look at the season three episode, ten finale sequence with all the gunplay. The only person who has any military background is Mitch. Tyson wasn’t in the military. Dwight wasn’t in the military. Dunmire’s guys, or goons as I like to call them, they’re all Dixie Mafia.
When you watch a martial arts movie, people watch it for the technical performance. When you watch a military show or movie, you’re watching for that precision and authenticity. We didn’t want any of that because it didn’t fit the characters. Besides Mitch. We had him more tactical, but everyone else was just pointing and pulling a trigger.
That also brings up an interesting point. Obviously, it has to be well-rehearsed because you want to keep everyone safe on set. How do you talk to the stunt performers about that safety precision, but make it look like they’re just swinging for the fences?
It comes back to performance. On this show, we have rehearsals. We have time to shoot previsualization. With television episodic schedules, they’re running so tight, but we were fortunate enough to build in the time for previs.
Some of these sequences were rather large, so we had to take the time to bring the stunt team in, choreograph it, shoot the previs, and then bring our cast in as well to dial them in.
Case in point, the cabin fight with Mitch and Cole. We spent an ample amount of time so everyone was dialed in and they were able to understand, story-wise, what we were trying to tell. Dial it in for the characters’ sake and what this is supposed to look like.
How do you manage that?
Everyone knows I wear many hats on this show. That’s the biggest question I get. Number one question: how do you do it all? Second unit directing, stunt coordinating, I’m stunt doubling for Stallone. I have to thank my team. It starts with them. I have an amazing assistant stunt coordinator who helps wrangle all these people.
I bring in great fight coordinators to help. It’s all about delegating and making sure everyone’s doing their job. It allows me the time to hover from place to place. As a department head, you’re in meetings, you’re in tech scouts, you’re on set. You can get pulled in so many different directions.
Production came to me toward the end of the show for this big shootout sequence. They came to me and said, okay, this is a big cinematic thing we’re about to do, you’re on set because we’re shooting episodes seven and eight…so the decision was to bring in a second unit director specifically for that sequence.
We brought in Chris O’Hara, who is a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was nice to see him again. We collaborated, but it gave me some fluidity and some flexibility in what I was doing. To be able to prep, but also have someone there to help me along the way.
You mentioned Episode 8, which has the hotel explosion, right?
That specific sequence, we had to shoot in two separate pieces. We had the actual location, but we couldn’t do any pyro at the location. We had to do all that on the stage, so that was a separate day. There were some other limitations. Shooting in downtown, there’s a trolley track right next to our location and it felt like every five minutes, but it was probably every 30 minutes to an hour the trolley would run by and we’d have to pause production to make things safe. We had a lot of stunt performers playing in that particular sequence. Stunt drivers and all the patrons at the party.
Then, of course, the explosion. I call it a three-headed attack. It was stunts, VFX, and special effects that all really put our heads together to accomplish that scene.
What you’re doing is so physical. It’s so in person. We think of VFX and special effects as something that’s so removed. Part of your job is you have to think about blending them together. For this particular sequence, what went into the department head meetings to make sure all of this came together to look like it was all captured in-camera, in the moment?
The first thing, and the good thing, is that there’s consistency. Same stunt coordinator, same special effects coordinator, same VFX team from seasons one through three. Those guys are like my brothers, you know? We love collaborating, so it was very easy for us to sit down and say, okay, this is what I need to do.
From a stunt perspective, I would say I need to have Mitch take a dive when this building explodes. We’re going to do some wire work there and then effects is going to come in and have their poppers, cannons, and debris they’re going to do.
We all sort of build together. It’s like a puzzle. I take a turn, SFX takes a turn, and VFX takes a turn. VFX was amazing because we were able to take our stunt double’s action when we did the wire work and did the rotoscoping to place him in a certain position.
Do you feel that because you’ve worked with these guys over the course of three years you’re thinking about stunts in a way that’s actively concerned with helping out the VFX team down the line in a new way?
Yes. It’s one big happy family. It literally is just a simple conversation of, hey, I need to do this, how does that affect you? Then they go, oh, well, we were thinking about doing this, does that affect you?
In the case of special effects, they always do their tests. That’s just a part of their process. I say, look, if you’re going to do any special effects testing that involves stunts, let’s do it together. Let’s do it during the previs. We’ve done that since season one and that worked beautifully.
On the flip side, you have more hand-to-hand combat and close-quarters fights that pop up throughout the season. Is there something that’s maybe unexpectedly more difficult about those close-quarters fights than something the scale of the hotel invasion?
It is. I was going to use the word you just said. They’re more intimate. That means they’re more personal. When I talk and sit down with Sylvester Stallone, those are the moments we really discuss. These big sequences, I’ll shoot a previs and just show it to him.
Those big sequences, I think, are a lot easier because we have all these different characters. We have their story. We need to tell Dwight’s journey. We need to tell Samuel Jackson’s character, his journey. These intimate moments, like that little fight in that cabin, that was a more intimate moment.
I said, look, Stallone, you’re the star of the show. We have to show your face, right? The audience wants to see that. I still want to see it, you know? We have to show those little details because those intimate moments are really important to the general audience.
Each season has been bigger, bolder everything. I’m curious about how you look at the stunts over the course of the season itself. You have to be bigger than last season, but now you’re also building to this finale. How do you plot your own story arc within the stunts throughout the whole season?
There’s a tone that we’re trying to achieve in the beginning cabin fight. It was very dark. It was eerie. That’s something we really wanted to hone in on, but then the very next big sequence was a funny driving sequence where Cleo Montague takes that Trans Am and just rips the front of the Dunmire front lawn apart doing donuts.
Those are arcs that we have to track and follow. We had moments like that throughout the season. Even in a later episode when Dwight and Tyson are having a chitchat inside a convenience store. We’re in the store, but looking out the window through the front doors. All of a sudden, Dunmire’s guys just get brutally assaulted by Bigfoot.
Now, it’s a brutal scene, but it’s more funny than anything. I think it’s because we’re tying in the dialog that Tyson and Dwight are having inside this convenience store to looking out there and seeing those guys just get hammered. Those arcs are important. I really wanted to make sure we followed along throughout the season.
That convenience store fight was supposed to be a more serious fight in the beginning. I didn’t want to do just a typical fight in a convenience store because we’ve seen those over and over. It’s something different. That’s what we came up with and I think it really sold well.
What is the dream, pie-in-the sky stunt or sequence you would love to be able to do that you haven’t had a chance to? Maybe it’s not for Tulsa King. Maybe it’s just like, man, I’ve always wanted to throw somebody off of a building in this fashion or something.
Well, you said it. You said it and I did it. I did a movie in South Carolina, and I don’t want to give away too much, but basically we have a character who kicks another character off the rooftop.
The producers came to me and they’re like, we want to do something really cool and cinematic. The typical approach would be the actor kicks the actor, he goes maybe out of frame, or we see the start of him falling off this building. Then you cut to a shot looking up toward the roof of the building and the sky, and your stunt double is falling through your frame. That’s sort of the easiest way to do things.
I said, let’s do something more dramatic and more cinematic. I pitched this whole idea and the DP was like, well, who’s going to shoot that? I was like, I will. They put me on a wire, 60 feet up in the air.
I actually shot this whole sequence, and I came up with a series of shots with a whole second unit that I directed. We had this guy just falling, I’m chasing him, we pulled him and we did a profile shot. It was really, really fun to do.
You don’t achieve that in one day. That definitely takes some time to rehearse with no human beings. I brought in a rigging team, obviously, because you’re putting people’s lives in other people’s hands. You have to make sure you have the right people there to do the job. We got it done. It was a hot day, but it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I would do that again.
