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Nick Harrison's Fight Club

Jessica Werb

| March 1, 2008

Image by: Darrell LeCorre

Some people have BlackBerrys. Some have home offices. Nick Harrison has an armoury. “I’ve got two full suits of armour; I have two leather suits of armour; I have about 300 weapons consisting of long swords, broad swords, sabres, cutlasses, boarding cutlasses, épées,” the 39-year-old nonchalantly confesses.

Harrison comes by his weaponry honestly: he’s an accredited fight director, choreographer and stuntman – in addition to acting and making radio appearances on JRFM as Nick the Guy, doing stunts such as bicycling through an automated carwash.

He’s also a case study in why it pays to have more than one skill. While attending the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in England as a foreign student, Harrison discovered a knack for stage combat, informed by his life-long interest in martial arts. In addition to graduating from the drama program, he became accredited through the Society of British Fight Directors – a move that paid off handsomely.

Slideshow: One knight in the West End

While working on the set of the TV show Hawkeye, he offered to do his own stunt for a scene in which his character was knocked out and dragged through mud. “I realized after that there was a need for actors who could do their own stunts.” And that realization led to another: “They didn’t tell me when I did the first stunt that you get paid more. They pay you a stunt contract and an actor contract.”

Since that first stunt, Harrison has been lit on fire, sword-fought monsters and choreographed fight scenes for everything from the last Scooby Doo movie to Vancouver Opera productions. (“People are vicious in operas,” he notes. “They’re always getting stabbed or killing themselves.”)

And while other actors are feeling the pinch of an ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike, Harrison happily reports that he has escaped relatively unscathed, thanks to his multifaceted abilities. “I’ve got enough things happening that it’s not directly affecting me right now,” he says. “People know what I do, so I still have people calling me when they need me to come out and do a fight scene for them.”

It all makes for an interesting day’s work: “It’s nice when I say I’m going to the office and my office is a film set in the middle of nowhere and I’m doing a fight scene in the mud.”