Move over Santa — Gabriel Basso spent Christmas 2024 handing over one unforgettable gift. Just like the man with the bag, The Night Agent’s star was flying high for delivery. Only Basso turned to the Netflix blimp instead of one red-nosed reindeer this holiday season.
So, what was Basso’s mission? To appear during NFL Christmas Gameday Live to unveil the action-packed trailer for The Night Agent Season 2, which launched on Jan. 23. Just like his unstoppable character Peter Sutherland, Basso completed his assignment — and then some. In the video, directed by Eric Talesnick, we see the actor hop out of an airborne vehicle and skydive high above the clouds. Looking back on filming the moment, the actor tells Tudum, “It was cool to see Houston from a blimp. Definitely a memory!”
Some may be wondering how much of this gravity-defying stunt was real or whether Basso really pulled it off himself. As the behind-the-scenes video above confirms, Basso’s high-flying jump is as real as the sense of mounting danger in Season 2. For Basso — who’s always been very proud of doing his own stunts — there’s no adventure too intimidating. In fact, the action star has been working toward his big blimp moment for quite some time.
Before filming the video, Basso had already gotten his skydiving certification and done some jumps on his own. So, it was “easy” for him — as someone with a passion for learning or expanding his physical skills — to say yes to diving tens of thousands of feet into the air for Netflix. “I definitely enjoy putting my body on the line for the sake of memorable scenes or sequences,” he explains. “I think that’s reflected in most of the fights in The Night Agent — the physicality and brutality isn’t faked.”
Basso then worked with aerial coordinator Sean MacCormac and Jon Devore — aerial stunt coordinator, cameraman, and the captain of the Red Bull Air Force — to prepare for and film this specific stunt. Devore previously collaborated with Tom Cruise and the Fast and the Furious team for their most adrenaline-pumping action moments. All three men filmed their jumps using Red Komodo 6K helmet cameras.
“Jon was a great teacher. So was Sean. When you’re surrounded by people that have dedicated their lives to things, to certain skills, it’s easy to just shut up and listen to them,” Basso says. “There was never a moment where I felt uncomfortable with anything they were asking me to do, I trusted them.”
Still, since safety was the team’s No. 1 priority, some pivots were necessary during filming. One was particularly familiar to Basso, as he executes a very similar stunt in an episode of The Night Agent Season 2. To film one portion of the blimp video, the production team needed to “bounce” the vessel about 20 feet into the air. Basso then had to jump out of the blimp and land on a massive pile of cardboard boxes.
As for Basso’s day job as Peter Sutherland, the actor told Netflix that in Season 2, “There were only, I think, two or three [stunts] in the whole season that they wouldn’t let me do, including jumping from a roof in Thailand and crawling on the exterior of a building in New York. Those were both my great stunt double Josiah Nolan on a wire, but I did all the fights.”
Of those fights, he says, “the basement fight in the embassy was my favorite, or one of the fights in the warehouse.” He also wants to make clear that his motivation for doing his own stunts is grounded in a desire for authenticity.
“A lot of times, talking about doing your own stunts is misconstrued as ‘I want to say I do my own stunts.’ That’s really not the motivation. It all comes from a place of immersion,” Basso said. “If you cut from an angle where you can see my face, and then the fight starts, and it cuts to behind me, as an audience, you immediately feel disconnected from the tension that was just building. If I’m not doing the thing, I feel like it’s robbing something from the audience.”
The Night Agent Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix, so you can watch for yourself and try to spot the twin stunt. And keep coming back to Tudum for even more intel on The Night Agent.
