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.”
