Tony Hawk Was Fired as David Spade's Stunt Double in POLICE ACADEMY 4
Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk once was hired to be David Spade’s stunt double in the 1987 comedy Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, and then he was fired.
Hawk was recently a guest on Spade’s podcast, Fly on the Wall, and while on the show they talked about Hawk’s brief experience as Spade’s skating stuntman. Hawk was required to double as Spade in scenes with complicated skateboarding tricks. Hawk explained that a growth spurt is what knocked him out of the film:
“I went through a growth spurt, from the time we tried out [for the movie] to the time we got there, and so for the first week, they were like, ‘I think that guy is too tall,' and I remember the director saying ‘y’know, he’s a pretty good skater but he’s a bad stunt double!’ and so then Stacy [Peralta, second unit director for skateboarding] kept telling me like ‘Stay low. Stay low!’ And I go… I was trying, and then they just quietly sent me home. Basically, I got fired.”
Hawk was replaced by another skater, Chris Miller, and that caused continuity errors because Miller skates with the opposite stance as Spade. Hawk did make a brief appearance in the movie, though.
Spade went on to explain that he actually was a relatively experienced skater, and he thought he could perform one of the stunts himself, and that stunt involved jumping five steps. He recalls how that turned out:
“I can do five steps seven out of 10 times. Then we go in and I do the first steps and I f—in’ wipe out, and then everyone has to wipe out on top of me ’cause they’re all like 2 feet behind me…there’s no adjusting.”
Hawk is the one who ended up completing that stunt. Hawk went on to talk about what he learned about stunt work in the movies saying:
“What we learned in that shoot is we learned about stunt bumps, and we didn’t know anything about that. So if we pretended like something was really hard, they would give us extra money.”
While Hawk was fired, he did up with a credit in the movie as “Skateboarder.”