How Shōgun's mesmerizing action sequences were made

FX’s Shōgun is mesmerizing for multiple reasons. The feudal Japan-set drama boasts phenomenal performances, direction, and production design, with masterful stunts adding to the authentically crafted world of the show. The political chess games played by Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), his allies, and his foes just wouldn’t hit the same if their fights and skilled movements weren’t engaging and accurate to the era. And that’s largely thanks to Shōgun’s stunt choreographer, Lauro David Chartrand-DelValle, who tells The A.V. Club that making these action sequences feel real distinguishes them from other projects. “There’s no Hollywood fluff,” he tells us.

Chartrand-DelValle, whose TV credits include Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass and series in the CW’s DC Universe, says Shōgun is distinctive from superhero or horror fare. Here, the success relies on keeping stunts immersive, quick, and believable. “We did it by adopting a no-bullshit policy,” he says, adding that the phrase became a running joke during filming. “That’s what we’d scream before cameras would roll. The director, producers, my team, everyone would laugh, and then we’d go into a scene where guys would get cut left, right, and center.”

The stunt choreographer previously worked with series star and EP Sanada on 2003's The Last Samurai, and he says he was eager to join Shōgun when the actor asked for him specifically. Chartrand-DelValle then built out his crew. “I had a core stunt team of six, so not that big. I brought in two people from TLS, including Nobuyuki Obikane and Kenji Sato, and we had Hiro Minami. They were my three main guys. Then we expanded with local people, assistants, and riggers. The largest we got up to was 40. It was an awesome time, so special and fun compared to The Last Samurai even.”

His first order of business? Setting up six to eight weeks of boot camp for training. “It was a ground-up learning experience, including for my team members.” They dove into stunts but also learned the traditional sense of how people moved, walked, bowed, and sat in 1600s Japan. Chartrand-DelValle says the show brought culture specialists from the country to do this. “I would put something together for the action sequences; they would come in and help fine-tune it to how someone might move their body during that period.” It wasn’t always an easy collaboration, but he’s glad they achieved the goal of finding a middle ground to make Shōgun’s action authentic and entertaining.

The A.V. Club spoke to Chartrand-DelValle about a few of those key scenes in Shōgun, how the stunt team helped make the magic happen, and what major action to expect from the FX drama’s final episodes.

The blazing, bloody cannons of episode 4

“The Eightfold Fence” was the script Chartrand-DelValle was most excited to bring to life. After all, the episode ends with cannon blasts, bodies exploding, and blood everywhere. Nagakado (Yuki Kura), Toranaga’s impetuous son, takes it upon himself to seek revenge, even if it ruins his father’s plans. So he uses a demonstration for the Regent’s messenger as a way to start a war. It’s gory and brutal to look at, and that’s exactly what they were hoping for.

As a reference point, he says he used YouTube clips of Rambo Five, specifically a scene where Sylvester Stallone uses a .50-caliber machine gun to shoot bad guys, cutting them in half with arms and intestines flying everywhere. “I showed showrunner Justin Marks that, his eyes got really big and excited, and he confirmed that’s what they were looking for,” Chartrand-DelValle says. He then talked to a friend who worked on the film to understand how they accomplished it. “They had magnate-controlled dummies that could move a bit by radio control. They took the center out of them to put in a foam core. Then they cut out the foam to add pig guts and wrapped them in an explosive det cord,” he explains.

However, after a whole bunch of ratchet practice with his stunt guys, they decided not to use dummies. “We wanted it to be real people because they move better while fighting.” It meant far more rehearsals, and strategizing how blood would splatter and body parts would drop. “We also had horse falls and samurai fighting, and then CGI had to take over with the limbs and guts coming off,” he says. “I was really happy when I saw the episode and watched everyone being demolished.”

The slippery slope of episode 5's earthquake

“Even before the on-set day, conceptualizing how we’d make the earthquake and landslide of episode five happen was quite amazing,” Chartrand-DelValle shares. “Broken To The Fist” features an already emotionally intense scene with John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), and Toranaga tensely conversing about Uejirou’s (Junichi Tajiri) sacrifice. Their discussion comes to an abrupt end when a massive earthquake occurs, and everything around them quickly collapses into the ground, including, briefly, Toranaga.

Chartrand-DelValle teamed up with the special effects team again to figure out what portions he’d have to work on versus what CGI would take care of. Once that was done, he made 100-foot-long slip-and-slide carpets to go down the slope of a hill. “We covered them with dirt and put trees on them. Then my stunt guys would get on them, and we’d pull it down with a truck so it would look like a real landslide.” But when he watched the performance, his reaction was an instant no: “It looked like they’re just sliding down. They needed to tumble and bounce. So I attached wires to all my guys that were on the slip, and then I had my riggers pull them as they were going down so they’d bounce and roll. It created the perfect visual for the effects team.”

The bigger challenge came with Toranaga’s fall, once he disappeared out of sight. “That was a huge set piece. We refurbished what we used for episodes one and two for his rescue sequence,” he reveals. Blackthorne runs into the cliff to find him, with Nagakado and the other close behind. Chartrand-DelValle says the actor insisted on doing his stunts despite a double being present on set. “Cosmo was like, ‘No, let me run; I’ll trip over this tree and do that and roll down.’ He was a hard guy to control. He wanted to do his stunts,” he laughs.

As for Sanada, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he was fully committed to the action. They built a big hole at the bottom of the set where Toranaga falls and gets buried but with enough space to escape for him if there was a need for it. “We gave him a breathing tube to use while the others kept digging and digging,” Chartrand-DelValle says. “He’d put dirt and mud all over his face and in his mouth. He just wanted to sell it for real.”

The sudden, shocking death in episode 7

How do you make it not look goofy when a man slips during a sword fight and bashes his head on a rock? That was the question on Chartrand-DelValle’s mind while choreographing the end of “A Stick Of Time.” Nagakado’s impulsiveness is his downfall in episode seven. His assassination attempt on his uncle, Saeki (Eita Okuno), ends after they engage in a brief battle. He would’ve won if it wasn’t for tripping on a wet surface and dying. “You don’t want the audience to laugh when that happens,” Chartrand-DelValle says. “We had to make it look natural.”

Nagakado’s surprising death drives the momentum of Shōgun in its final few episodes, and Chartrand-DelValle says the team knew the weight of that scene. He appreciated how none of the action exists for the sake of it. “It’s always driven by the story, so we never go over the top or super long with fights. There’s no waste of time or movements. It’s cut to kill and then we move on.”

In episode seven, Nagakado enters Seiko’s living space, with men from both sides swiping katanas at each other. “This was a fight through a house and running through a pond. We could’ve made it much bigger, but we didn’t, even if it had a lot of moving parts,” the stunt choreographer says. “Different fights are going on in the background, but it’s peripheral because we stay with the main characters as their story is advancing.” He adds the entire fight scene took about a month to finesse, with the stunt guys also perfecting how to believably fall flat on a rock to bash a head on it.

What to expect in Shōgun episodes 9 and 10

Thanks to a thrilling episode eight cliffhanger—Mariko is “ready” to do what it takes for Toranaga to win—Shōgun’s last two installments promise to be just as thrilling with their stunts, Chartrand-DelValle teases. And you can get ready for Sawai to take center stage in a way she hasn’t yet. “We had tears on the day watching her work. She blew us away,” he says while describing her performance and readiness to take on the challenge in episode nine. The penultimate outing’s fight scene, he shares, took three days to film—the longest in Shōgun. As for the finale, everything is strictly under wraps, but brace yourselves for cool ninjas, he says, before clarifying: “It’s not the typical Hollywood ninja stuff you’re used to.”