Rising Stars: Meet Joey Wilson of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joey Wilson.

Hi Joey, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Growing up in Southern California, right in the heart of the entertainment industry, has always felt a bit ironic to me. Most people I’ve met in this line of work have these bold, romantic stories, leaving a small town with twenty bucks in their pocket, sleeping in their car, chasing that Hollywood dream. Meanwhile, I was just here. A local. And weirdly, that made me the outsider.

Like most kids in the ‘90s, I was constantly climbing trees, falling out of them, bouncing between sports, and never really sitting still. That got me the standard ADHD diagnosis in school, though I didn’t do much with it, unless you count trying to grab attention as a coping mechanism. Like any kid I wanted to be a movie star, plain and simple. And to her credit, my mom never said no when I wanted to try something new. She signed me up for acting classes early on, and I caught the bug. But even then, I figured breaking into the industry as an actor alone was a long shot. So I turned my attention behind the camera. I thought if I could understand what filmmakers needed from performers, I’d have a double-edged advantage, valuable on both sides of the lens.

In my teenage years, I volunteered for Pasadena Unified School District’s TV program and the City of Commerce’s TV department. I learned a lot, fast, and mostly that behind-the-scenes work is as thankless as it is vital. They’re the real unsung heroes of the industry.

At 18, I needed a real paycheck, so I worked in coffee shops around the Valley and Venice for a couple years. That was enough to teach me the service industry wasn’t my future. Around that time, a friend told me Universal Studios was hiring for Halloween Horror Nights. I’ve always loved Halloween, the performance, the playfulness, the mischief. It felt like the perfect gig to break up the grind.

Quick flashback here: when I was 8, I was obsessed with having the best Halloween costume. I decided to be the Whomping Willow from Harry Potter. Problem was, no 8-year-old’s tall enough to sell being a tree. So, my mom and I built my first pair of stilts, basically just 1×1 wood beams with shelving brackets for my feet. I wore a bark-covered wetsuit and duct-taped those stilts to my legs for the entire night. It was ridiculous, and I loved every second. That night lit the spark for my love of stilt-walking.

Back to Universal. I was 18, auditioning for Horror Nights, and got cast as Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th maze. I was 6’2” and maybe 145 pounds soaking wet. With the oversized foam Jason head, I looked more bobblehead than boogeyman, but I didn’t care. I was performing, I was alive, and I’d rediscovered what I loved doing.

The next year I noticed they had stilt roles, which I had completely missed the year before. I auditioned and got in. That opened the door to everything. I suddenly found myself among some of the most skilled stilt performers in the business, and I learned everything I could. Over time, I went from cast member to team leader, eventually managing and performing with the stilt-walkers for 13 seasons of Halloween Horror Nights.

During my years at Universal, I also got to stretch my skills with creature suits and character work. I introduced the park’s first stilted Megatron character, which I performed for nearly a decade, alongside Optimus Prime. I suited up as a raptor in the Jurassic World area, and even played a Durmstrang student during the opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Parallel to my time at Universal, I found another home at the original Tempest Freerunning Academy, the first facility in LA dedicated to parkour and freerunning. It had just opened down the street from where I grew up. Ironically, I’d snuck into the construction site years before, climbing around the half-built walls with no clue that this place would shape my future.

I fell in love with the gym and the sport instantly. Tempest was founded by a group of professional stunt performers who were pioneers in bringing freerunning to the mainstream. Thanks to my background in video production, I started volunteering with their media team, doing anything I could to help craft their now-iconic training videos.

Eventually, I left the coffee shop grind behind and joined the gym full-time, working the front desk, then coaching classes, filming, and being immersed in the culture. It was through Tempest that I found my way into the stunt industry. Their team not only became my friends, but my biggest mentors.

Of course, not all stunts go according to plan. In 2013, during a simple training day, I took a bad fall. I was in a coma for two days and spent a week in the hospital. I was told not to train, work, or go to school for six months—but I couldn’t sit still that long. Six weeks later, I ran American Ninja Warrior and placed 19th in the Vegas semifinals out of over 250 competitors. Not bad for someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury.

Tempest gave me my path, and I can never thank them enough. Because of them, I got an agent and started working as a stunt performer in film and television. Small jobs at first, but it was happening. I was doing the thing I loved.

Then the world shut down.

When the industry came back to life, I came back to Universal. But this time, I finally had the chance to do what I’d been eyeing for a decade: perform in the WaterWorld stunt show. It’s one of the longest-running and highest-rated stunt shows in the world, based on a movie nobody saw, and I’m proud to say I’m still performing there today. It’s the culmination of everything I’ve trained for: acting, stunts, stilts, creature work… all in one explosive live show in front of 3,000 people a day.

Since then, I’ve been lucky to book some fun projects, like playing one of the Drone Hosts in Season 4 of Westworld. It was the first time I got to combine creature suit acting and stilts for a major TV show and help bring a character to life that felt uniquely mine. It wasn’t a huge role, but it meant something big to me.

Now, as the Hollywood landscape shifts and evolves in the face of new challenges, I’m still here, still performing, still growing, and still damn grateful to be doing what I love.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I wouldn’t call the road smooth, more like a dirt trail with some loose gravel and the occasional pothole you don’t see until you’ve already face-planted. But that’s part of what’s made it fun. If it had all come easy, I probably wouldn’t appreciate any of it as much as I do.

There’ve definitely been bumps, injuries, dry spells, jobs that felt like they were going somewhere and then evaporated overnight. I’ve tripped at the proverbial finish line more times than I can count and had moments where I thought, “Alright, maybe it’s time to get a ‘real job’” but that thought usually fades pretty quick when I remember how allergic I am to sitting still or doing the same thing twice.

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that consistency beats hype. Showing up, staying ready, being a decent human, those things matter more than people think. Also, don’t underestimate the value of having good people around you who’ll tell you when you’re being an idiot and hype you up when you forget what you’re capable of.

So no, it hasn’t been smooth. But looking back, the chaos is kind of the charm.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’ve always kinda described what I do as “Doing stupid things intelligently”. It’s the best way I can describe purposely setting yourself on fire or hitting the ground in the same spot time and time again. You’ve gotta be smart about how you do it.

I’m a stunt performer, creature suit actor, and sometimes a guy on stilts pretending to be a robot, a raptor, or some other larger-than-life character. If it involves movement, performance, and a little bit of danger, I’m probably into it. I’ve spent over a decade working live shows at Universal Studios Hollywood, and on the film/TV side, I’ve been lucky to do some creature and stunt work on a handful of fun projects, Westworld being a big highlight.

A lot of what I do sits somewhere between athlete and actor. It’s physical storytelling, bringing characters to life through movement, whether that’s sprinting through fire, taking a fall, or silently looming over someone in a 9-foot-tall foam suit. No two days are the same, and that’s exactly why I love it.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
What I like? There’s nowhere else quite like it. You’ve got mountains, beaches, movie sets, world-class food, and the weirdest collection of humans all smashed into one place. It’s a city where you can spend the morning training in a gym, grab a smoothie next to someone who was just on a billboard, and end your day in a cemetery watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure projected across a mausoleum It’s chaos, but the good kind.

What I don’t love? The traffic, obviously. The rent prices are aggressive. And there’s a certain performative energy that can be exhausting, everyone’s pitching something, even when they’re just ordering coffee. But even that has its charm, if you’re in the right mood. It has the “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” mentality that I love.

At the end of the day, LA is what you make of it. It’ll chew you up if you’re not careful, but if you can roll with it, and laugh at it a little, it’ll feed you some of the wildest, most unexpected opportunities of your life.

 

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @_JcarecrowJoe_
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/IfwK4Vi1YUo?si=en5nds5EKmdUtNZk