Tony Hawk has been fired as David Spade’s stunt double in POLICE ACADEMY 4

Professional skateboarder Tony Falco it was once assumed to be David Spadeis the stunt double in the 1987 comedy Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patroland then he was fired.

Hawk was a recent guest on the Spade podcast, Fly on the wall, and during the show they talked about Hawk’s brief stint as Spade’s skating stuntman. Hawk was to double as Spade in scenes with complicated skateboarding tricks. Hawk explained that a growth spurt is what kicked him out of the film:

“I went through a growth spurt from the moment we tried [for the movie] up until the time we got there, and then for the first week, they were like, ‘I think that guy is too tall’ and I remember the director saying ‘you know, he’s a pretty good skater but he’s a bad stunt double’! ‘ and so then Stacy [Peralta, second unit director for skateboarding] he kept telling me, “Stay low.” Stay low!’ And I go… I was trying, and then they just silently sent me home. I basically got fired.”

Hawk was replaced by another skater, Chris Miller, and this caused continuity errors because Miller skates with the opposite position to Spade. However, Hawk made a brief appearance in the film.

Spade went on to explain that he was actually a relatively skilled skater and thought he could pull off one of the stunts himself, and that stunt involved jumping five steps. Remember how it turned out:

“I can take five steps seven times out of ten. Then we go in and I take the first few steps and brush myself off, and then everyone has to brush all over me because they’re all 2 feet behind me… there’s no adjustment.

Hawk is the one who ended up completing that stunt. Hawk went on to talk about what he learned about stunts in movies by saying:

“What we learned during filming is that we learned about stunt crashes and we didn’t know anything about it. So if we pretended something was really hard, they’d give us extra money.”

While Hawk was being fired, he got a film credit as “Skateboarder.”