Before he signed on to play the preacher Joshua Silburn in The Messengers, a new end-of-days drama on the CW, Jon Fletcher had never done his own stunts. Now that the series has finished filming its first season, the actor says he’s a pro—and he’s got the bruises to prove it.
In one particularly memorable scene, Fletcher’s character is battling a villain when she uses her telekinetic powers to fling him against a wall. Sounds easy enough to pull off, right? Not exactly.
“It’s me standing in my boxers getting strapped into a harness and attached to two different wires,” Fletcher explains, “and I ran across the room and one of the wires yanked me back and slammed me against the wall.”
And how did the actor, who’s appeared on The Good Wife and City of Dreams, prepare to be tossed around a room?
“You just need to act not-at-all terrified,” he says. ‘This was the first stunt that I’ve ever done like that, and it all depended on how hard the two guys holding the wire pulled it. The first time they barely pulled, and I asked them to yank harder. So, by the last take, they really went for it and I flew off my feet and landed on the corner of the wall.”
The resulting bumps reminded the actor of another recent depiction of daring feats: “The next morning I woke up with the biggest bruises on my legs,” he says. “It looked like I was in 50 Shades of Grey.”
Physical trials aside, the first season of The Messengers finds Fletcher’s character getting more than his fair share of hard knocks.
“Joshua is the believer of the show; he’s been raised with the idea that if we do good for God, God will do good for us,” Fletcher explains. “But after this thing crashes to Earth, he has this reawakening and his whole belief system gets challenged. He’s trying to keep his faith and struggle with what he saw—it’s an interesting journey he goes on.”
