Cory DeMeyers Built “The Deputy’s” Station Fight Around the Room — and Had the Mailboxes Moved So the Squibs Could Work

• Cory DeMeyers is an Emmy-winning stunt coordinator who won for “The Righteous Gemstones.”
• He coordinated the fights and a car jump on the new feature “The Deputy.”
• He says coordinating work has been slow since January 2025 and he is chasing jobs again.

Posted: October 19, 2026

DeMeyers came up as a professional parkour athlete and a Red Bull world champion before going full-time as a stunt performer, then moved into coordinating and directing. The turning point he names is 300: Rise of an Empire, where he was performing and watched Zack Snyder work with stunt coordinator Damon Caro — that is where the interest in directing started. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Rebel Ridge sit on the performing side of the résumé; the Emmy came from coordinating The Righteous Gemstones.

The useful part for a coordinator reading this is how he ran The Deputy, Matt Sukkar’s feature debut, shot in Natchez, Mississippi in roughly two and a half weeks. He landed and went straight at the two hardest things on the board — the car jump and the front-office fight — rather than working the schedule in order. The climactic police-station fight was built off the story beats and the physical space rather than a set piece dropped into a room: production design and set dressing were working with the action, and the mailboxes were repositioned so a shotgun blast and squibs rigged in the mailboxes would throw mail across the shot.

The coffee carafe was already in the script. DeMeyers’ job was working out how the character gets a hand on it, and then fitting the choreography to the actor instead of the other way around — Toby is not a fighter, so the coffee-pot attack is played with hesitation in it. His line on the whole approach is that the action “can’t be contrived.”

The other half of the interview is the labor market. DeMeyers has not had a major project since wrapping one in January 2025. He is updating his résumé, going back to teams that used to hire him as a performer, and still pushing for coordinating work — while directing on his own: the short crime thriller Danny Boy, and G(l)ory Days, a horror comedy written with Sammy Horowitz and Adam Pasen whose 27-minute proof of concept was shot in Charleston in four days with a cast and crew of about 50. He is also a vice president of the International Stunt Association.

Source: Meet Me at Crafty — Cory Demeyers Knows When to Take a Hit—and When to Step Back

Learn more on IMDb: The Righteous Gemstones (2019) · Cory DeMeyers · Damon Caro