Ryan Gosling 'blacked out' doing a 12-story drop during filming for 'The Fall Guy' movie

For Ryan Gosling, becoming "The Fall Guy" meant facing his fear of heights.

Early in the movie (in theaters Friday), the hotshot Hollywood stuntman he plays, Colt Seavers, performs a big fall with all the bravado of someone who has done this hundreds of times. To ask Gosling about it, however, that couldn't be further from the truth.

"You could see the fear in my eyes," he says. "I have a fear of heights. And they dropped me 12 stories.

"I think I blacked out. Honestly, I don't remember much."

In the scene, a harnessed Colt is doubling for superstar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He suavely dons a pair of sunglasses before seemingly thoughtlessly falling backward off the 12th floor inside a high-rise.

The shades were concealing the very real panic coursing through Gosling.

"Ryan had to put sunglasses on during that stunt because he was so scared. He was worried you'd see the whites of his eyes," says Emily Blunt, who plays his ex turned love interest Jody Moreno.

"You could hear a pin drop. I was very scared watching you do that."

The movie is loosely adapted from the '80s hit show "The Fall Guy," in which Lee Majors played Colt, a stuntman and a bounty hunter, and Heather Thomas was Jody Banks, a fellow stunt performer. The parallels between the movie (directed by David Leitch, a former stuntman himself) and the TV series more or less end there.

Leitch's "The Fall Guy" is an all-gas, no-brakes action film interwoven with a love story between Colt and Jody. But wait, there's also a ridiculous sci-fi film-within-a-film that Jody's directing and a dash of thriller as a murder is uncovered. It was a lot to accomplish ? certainly more than what Gosling could do by himself.

'It took five stunt guys to make one fall guy,' Ryan Gosling says

Though Blunt, 41, did all of her own stunts, "it took, like, five stunt guys to make one fall guy," Gosling says.

Thankfully for Gosling, 43, his stunt doubles subbed in for him as Colt is set on fire (the work of Ben Jenkin), falls 150 feet from a helicopter (that's second-generation stunt guy Troy Brown) and rolls a car 8? times on a beach. This cannon-roll stunt, performed by seasoned stunt driver Logan Holladay, broke a Guinness World Record. And Justin Eaton made Gosling look like a martial arts expert.

Gosling, who has had a stunt double "for most of my life," hails stunt performers as the "unsung heroes" of cinema.

"They do all this really dangerous, amazing stuff. They kind of come in and risk everything and then disappear. If they do their job well, you never know that they were there," he says. "It's just so messed up that they don't get the credit that they deserve."

Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt agree Colt Seavers is 'a die-hard Taylor Swift fan'

At one point, Colt is deep in his feelings as he worries about Jody's extreme reaction to his unexpected return from a self-imposed exile.

In a scene that was teased during a Super Bowl commercial, Colt silently sits in a car, cloaked in darkness as he mouths the words to the beloved Taylor Swift track "All Too Well."

With Gosling recently showing off his vocal chops in "Barbie," on the Oscars stage and during a "Saturday Night Live" "All Too Well" parody with Blunt, it's notable that he abstains from breaking out in song. Why was that?

"I think he knows every line," Blunt says. But "you can't out-Swift Swift."

"You don't even want to try. He's not an idiot," Gosling says. "I think she was voicing his (feelings), you know. She had the words that he couldn't say. ... And he was so grateful in that moment."

Adds Blunt: "She has the words for all of our broken souls. That's the truth. I think Colt's a die-hard Taylor Swift fan, right?"

Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling vacationed with their families in Australia while filming

Making the film required Blunt and Gosling to travel to Sydney, where it was summer while North America was in winter ? which was not a coincidence.

"It was great to escape the New York winter. I was delighted," Blunt says.

"We were supposed to shoot the film somewhere else. I won't say where, but it didn't seem like it would be as fun for my kids," says Gosling, who's one of the film's producers. "We all had a conversation about where it would be, and Australia was the perfect place."

He adds, "I've been lucky enough to have my my family come with me on every film I've made so far."

Gosling and Eva Mendes have two daughters, 9-year-old Esmeralda and 8-year-old Amada. Blunt and her husband, John Krasinski, also share two daughters: 10-year-old Hazel and 7-year-old Violet.

"Both our families were with us, so that obviously is essential if you're that far away. And it made it so much more effortless to be able to go to work knowing that we were all together," Blunt says. "It was wonderful. I didn't feel I had to juggle (work and parenting), thank God."

The ambitious action scenes in "The Fall Guy" are made all the more dramatic by the fact that they take place at some of Australia's most famous sights, including the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. Both venues had to be temporarily closed so Gosling and Blunt could film otherworldly fight scenes and heart-pounding car chases.

Shutting down the bridge was a bit of a full-circle moment for Gosling.

"I had been there 20 years earlier or something and climbed the bridge with my mom. And then got dragged across it this time," he says. "So I've had a really interesting relationship with that bridge.

"One of these days I'll just drive across it."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ryan Gosling describes the 'Fall Guy' stunt that scared Emily Blunt