STUNT DRIVER

Mike has been a stunt driver for over 30 years. He’s spent a lot of time in just about every make and model of vehicle, race car, big rig, motorcycle and boat on the planet. Seriously.

As the owner of Picture Vehicle’s Unlimited He has bought, sold, customized, crashed, rolled or jumped many hundreds of vehicles for the entertainment industry.

A stunt driver knows where to push the limits and the dedicated ones know how to push beyond, while keeping it safe and in frame. “My job is to entertain, not to endanger. I make sure the actors, the crew and the sets we work on are safe. I work directly with insurance underwriters to make sure we have 100% sign off on a project while also making sure the stunt is awe-inspiring on camera,” Mike says.

A lot of professional stunt performers out there may be at the top of their game in martial arts, horse work, falls, fire or stunt fights and then include car work on their resume. Mike does one kind of stunt work and that is stunt driving and automotive stunt coordinating.

Experience teaches the limitations, physics and the various outcomes of a stunt. Mike’s experience of living through a plane crash in 1985, in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico and surviving a reconstruction of one of California’s deadliest big rig accidents put him in terrifying, near-death positions. But it is that kind of experience that he brings to action and to doing it safely. This is not your average resume.

After spending 17 hours before he was found, with about an hours worth of blood left in his body, nearly 30 broken bones with his plane in a heap around him, Mike figured if he could survive and recover from that, then there wasn’t many vehicle-based stunt scenes that would ever be as challenging.

Determined to continue doing what he loved became his main focus as he learned how to walk again. He still walks with a limp, but it has been over 25 years since that wreck and several hundred projects have successfully come and gone, one step at a time. Life is good.