Spain — Joel Abadal on Doubling Brad Pitt: Six Weeks of Design for Ten Seconds of Action
- Joel Abadal was Brad Pitt’s stunt double on David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast.”
- The stunt team spent six weeks designing the action before the two-and-a-half-month shoot started.
- Pitt thanked Abadal by name, unprompted, at a San Sebastián press conference.
Posted: October 11, 2026
The number in this interview is the one to keep. Joel Abadal, a 30-year-old performer from Castelldefels, doubled Brad Pitt on Heart of the Beast, and he puts the ratio plainly: “Just 10 seconds of action in a film represent weeks of work for us stunt performers. The goal is that, when Brad Pitt arrives on set, he already knows what he’s going to do.” The shoot ran two and a half months. The stunt department had six weeks before it — walking every location, running tests and designing the fights — so that the principal’s day could be short.
The workflow he describes is the useful part. For a delicate sequence between Pitt’s character and wolves, the second unit shot the whole scene with Abadal in the lead role, built to the script and to Ayer’s guidelines, and then screened it as a proposal. “We show this to the director and producers to see if it aligns with their vision. Then, once that’s done, we show it to Brad Pitt, so he can give his opinion on whether he likes it or not.” Stunt coordinator Allan Poppleton presents it; Abadal then performs it physically in front of Pitt, repeating what is already on the footage, and talks him through the execution. The action is approved as a finished piece of filmmaking before the principal is ever in the frame.
Abadal’s read on why the job ran smoothly is worth noting for anyone who has worked with a lead who second-guesses the department: Pitt won an Oscar playing a stunt double, and Abadal says it showed. “I sensed that he had absolute trust in the stunt department. Whatever we said was gospel. [The production team] asked me for a lot of advice on how to perform certain stunts, and he basically only listened to me.” The shoot was in New Zealand, in weather Abadal calls harsh, with water work — the conditions where a department either has the lead’s confidence or spends the day arguing for it.
The career path behind it is a circus-to-stunts route rather than a sports one. Circus school at the Ateneo Popular de Nou Barris in Barcelona, then artistic gymnastics for the acrobatic ceiling, then Muay Thai and taekwondo; at 13 his work caught the attention of Luis Riviera of the stunt-coordination company In Extremis, which put him in Paco Plaza’s Rec 3: Genesis. He later trained at the École Nationale de Cirque in Montreal and qualified as a horse master. He had just finished Spartacus: House of Ashur with Poppleton when the Pitt job came through — and Poppleton, true to form, held the name back until it was confirmed, so Abadal waited in Thailand and kept two months of Muay Thai in the bank while sending through measurements and photos. On the third Avatar he found James Cameron the harder room: “The surgical precision required to work with Cameron is impressive, because he demands absolute perfection. You have to be able to work under that kind of pressure.” Next up are The Legend of Zelda and Sam Mendes’s four Beatles films, shooting simultaneously.
Learn more on IMDb: Heart of the Beast (2026) · Joel Abadal · Allan Poppleton
