Tony Hawk was fired as David Spade’s stunt double in 1987’s Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.
Spade’s podcast, “Fly on the Wall,” hosted Hawk and revealed his brief tenure as Spade’s skating doppleganger in the film. Hawk was required to double as Spade in scenes with complicated skate tricks.
There was one hang-up with that.
“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,’” Hawk recalled. “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.”
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Hawk was replaced by another skater, Chris Miller, as Spade’s double. Continuity errors ensued, because Miller skates with the opposite stance as Spade.
While Hawk was not Spade’s double, he made a brief appearance in the film. Spade explained that as a relatively experienced skater, he thought he could perform one of the stunts himself, which involved jumping five steps. “I can do five steps seven out of 10 times,” Spade said. “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 completed the stunt.
Hawk learned about Hollywood stunt work-arounds during his stint. “What we learned in that shoot is we learned about stunt bumps,” Hawk said on the podcast. “And we didn’t know anything about that. So if we pretended like something was really hard, they would give us extra money.”
Hawk ended up with a credit in the movie as “Skateboarder.”
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