John Koyama, Freddy Bouciegues and a Four-Man Melee Team Win the 2026 Emmy Stunt Awards

• John Koyama won the drama stunt coordination Emmy for his work on "The Boys."
• Freddy Bouciegues and Hugh Aodh O’Brien won the comedy award for "Spider-Noir."
• Four performers won for a seven-on-seven melee shot in mud and full armour.

Posted: September 7, 2026

The three stunt categories were handed out across the two nights of the Creative Arts Emmys at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on September 5 and 6, 2026, and all three went to departments whose work reads as impact rather than as coverage.

Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Drama Programming went to John Koyama, supervising stunt coordinator on The Boys (Prime Video). Koyama's department has spent the run of that show solving the same problem in different rooms: how to sell superhuman force with performers who still have to walk away, which in practice means the hit is carried by ratchet work, breakaway set construction and blood rigs rather than by the performer absorbing anything real. He took the category over a field of coordinators working at the top of episodic television — Casey O'Neill and Josh Kemble on Fallout, Victor Paguia on FBI, David Rowden Sr. on The Rookie, and Hiro Koda with Jahnel Curfman on Stranger Things.

Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming went to supervising stunt coordinator Freddy Bouciegues and stunt coordinator Hugh Aodh O'Brien for Spider-Noir (MGM+/Prime Video) — one of five wins for a series that had been cancelled days earlier. A period-styled comic-book show is a doubling and matching brief as much as a fight brief: the look depends on silhouette, so the stunt team is working in coats, hats and hard shoes on dressed period surfaces, where a fall has to be rigged for a floor nobody chose for its give. They beat Shauna Duggins and Chris O'Hara on Beef, Mallory Thompson on Palm Royale, Hank Amos and Dave Macomber on Peacemaker, Tom Place on Poker Face, and Freddie Poole on Tulsa King.

Outstanding Stunt Performance went to Zach Roberts, Gyula Tóth, Chris Cox and Jake Cox for the seven-on-seven melee in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode "In the Name of the Mother" (HBO Max). That sequence is the clearest argument in this year's field for what the performance category is actually rewarding. It ran roughly ten days of shooting after extended rehearsal, staged in mud, in full armour, under coordinator Florian Robin and 2nd unit director Rob Inch. Roberts, who doubled Aerion from the moment the helmet went on, has described negotiating the costume itself as part of the stunt: rubberising the spikes on the pauldrons, shortening the cape so it could not catch a horse or a foot, and working with a helmet that removed most of his peripheral vision. Armour turns every landing into a problem of where the weight goes, and mud removes the one thing a performer normally relies on to control it. Roberts has since moved up to assistant coordinator for season two.

Sources: Television Academy — Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Drama Programming · Television Academy — Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming · Television Academy — Outstanding Stunt Performance · TVLine — Creative Arts Emmys 2026: Full List of Winners · TheWrap — How Zach Roberts Did the Show's Biggest Fight in Ornate Armor

Learn more on IMDb: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026) · John Koyama · Freddy Bouciegues