Fight scenes in movies are choreographed with expert precision to make sure no one gets hurt, but when you throw in a professionally trained MMA fighter with a history of brutality, anything can happen. Just askJake Gyllenhaal, who stars alongsideConor McGregorin Doug Liman’s updated version ofRoad House, which hit Prime Video on June 28, 2025. Gyllenhaal takes over the role made famous by Patrick Swayze, and if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, he had to constantly remind his co-star to pull his punches so no one would be injured.
Road House
Speaking toComicBook.comduring the press junket forRoad House, Gyllenhaal praised the work of Garrett Warren and Steve Brown, who coordinateda lot of the stunts in the film. He said that while there are a lot of unknown factors that come with close combat fighting, the pair had an incredible team working behind them. Check out his comments below.
“I mean look, I think Garrett Warren and Steve Brown, who designed a lot of the fights, they had a tough job to try an up the original. And they did have an incredible crew, but a lot of the stuff we designed was meant to be pretty close contact, you know? And grappling. And There were a lot of unknown factors that come in when you’re fighting like that.”
Gyllenhaal would go on to mention that one of the unknown factors in that situation was his co-star,Conor McGregor. McGregor plays Knox, an enforcer brought in to act as the yang to Dalton’s yin, and since the MMA fighter is used to throwing real punches, Gyllenhaal revealed that he constantly had to remind the brawler to not actually hit him. Seeing as how this was McGregor’s first feature film role, it was a bit of a challenge to say the least.
“And yes, Conor is the main unknown in that way because he is used to really fighting and we had to fake fight. So constantly throughout the journey before takes I had to be like ‘Remember… don’t actually punch me in the face.’ And he’d be like ‘Oh right, right, right, right.’ Then I’d be like ‘Oh my gosh.'”
Though he constantly had to remind McGregor to not really hit him during filming,accidents do happen, and there was one instance where the MMA Lightweight ended up hitting Gyllenhaal for real after the cameras stopped rolling. Appearing onThe Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the 43-year-old star spoke of the incident, which occurred in the early hours of the morning while the pair were reviewing footage of one of their fight sequences. Gyllenhaal says it came as a total shock, but was also a complete accident.
“It was late, because we shot a lot of these fight scenes at night, so it was like 3 a.m., and he was talking to me real close and he was like, ‘Yeah, that left hook looks good, but then when you do it, boom!’ And he hit me by mistake. I was like ‘Oh!,’ and he was like ‘Oh!'”
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Thankfully, Gyllenhaal didn’t hold it against McGregor, and the pair were able to co-exist and laugh about the incident as they continued to film the movie. For McGregor, he’s spoken very highly of his co-star in the past,calling Gyllenhaal a “great guy.”
