Troy’s father, Bob Brown, was one of Hollywood’s premiere stunt performers of the 1980s and ’90s, a double for Jim Carrey in The Mask and The Cable Guy and for Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Last Action Hero, to name just a few of the dozens of films in which he endured punches, plunges, and crashes. Bob still does it today, although in recent years he has transitioned more to the role of stunt supervisor. In 2002, when Troy was around 3 years old and his dad was 43, Bob set a high-fall record by jumping through a skyscraper window 20 stories in the air—while engulfed in flames—for the World Stunt Awards ceremony on ABC.
“I just grew up with it,” Troy tells Vanity Fair. “It was just like, this is what my dad does. He just does stunts in movies, and I always thought that was the coolest thing ever. I would bring my dad into show-and-tell at school and just have him talk about high falls.”
A few years later, when Bob was the stunt coordinator on the 2005 Vin Diesel comedy The Pacifier, he asked his son if he’d like a job. “He was like, ‘You want to jump out of a helicopter into the ocean?’ And I was like, ‘Heck yeah!’” Troy says. “So they signed me on a contract as a stunt performer, and that was my first job. That’s how I got my SAG card.”
It was just a camera rehearsal, and wasn’t a steep drop. Professional divers waited in the water to retrieve him. But still. “In the movie, they probably fell from 60 or 80 feet. I only went from 20 to 25 feet, max,” Troy says. “They weren’t going to throw a kid 60 feet out of a helicopter, but I remember doing it. And it wasn’t scary.”
He grew up watching his father and his fellow performers in the stunt company Brand X rehearsing their falls, throws, and hits in his family’s backyard obstacle course. Occasionally, they’d let him try and taught him the ropes (or lack of ropes). “Every Saturday when I was a kid, my dad would do stunt practice at our house,” he says. “He had a 40-foot tower with some Port A Pits and a trampoline with a spotting rig, and they would do air rams.” (Stunt jargon translation: a device using pressurized air would catapult them into stacks of portable padding used by pole vaulters and gymnasts.) “He would have some guys come over and they would practice, and I would just practice with them. That’s how I started getting reps doing high falls. I would practice every day.”
Did his father have rules, like: Don’t do this unless I’m there to supervise? “My dad was very safe about everything,” Troy says. “He was like, ‘Just don’t be stupid with it. You can really hurt yourself doing this, so just be smart.’”
Sometimes he learned lessons the hard way. “There were a few times where I was on the trampoline and I was doing a trick that I had never tried, and I would just land on my head. I would get hurt and I’d be crying out in the front yard,” Troy says. “My dad would be like, ‘What did you do?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I tried to do a double back flip with no spot. No one’s watching me. It was just me trying stuff.’ He was just like, ‘You should have had a spotter, you should have had blah, blah…’”
Throughout his childhood, Troy continued taking occasional jobs whenever Brand X needed a kid for an act of cinematic daredevilry. He did elf stunts in 2006’s The Santa Clause 3, and hightop tumbles in Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland. He ricocheted around a bounce house in 2010’s Little Fockers. Along the way, he was learning what no school could teach. “If someone was rehearsing a fire burn, I would just be there to watch, but they’d be like, ‘Troy, come help paint gel onto this guy’s face.’ And I learned, ‘This is what the gel does, and this is how we use it.’ So yeah, the apprenticeship thing is definitely for real.”