Back in Action director Seth Gordon was a few beers deep at a Dodgers game in 2019, when he started joking about a fake movie he called Baby Bjorn Identity.
“What happen if Jason Bourne had kids? Would he have to quit the business?” Gordon asked his friend, movie producer Beau Bauman. “Or what if it was Mr. and Mrs. Smith, not Jason Bourne?”
Six years later, that movie is a reality: An action comedy starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz as spies who retire to a quiet life with two kids… until they are inevitably pulled back in to the world of high-stakes espionage. But the road to making Back in Action—which began streaming on Netflix today, two months after its initial November 15 release date—was anything but a smooth ride. Because in April 2023, almost three months into production, Foxx was hospitalized with a severe, mysterious illness (later revealed to be a stroke), forcing the production to shut down.
“We’d gotten through this enormous production,” Gordon said. “And then just when we were getting nearly done, we were put in the time-out circle.”
To say Foxx is an integral part of Back in Action is an understatement. He’s the star, an executive producer, and the reason that Diaz—who hasn’t acted in a film in over a decade—came out of her so-called retirement. Gordon, who he’d previously directed Foxx in 2011’s Horrible Bosses, said he “wouldn’t even have thought it was a possibility” to get Diaz, if not for Foxx. The two actors share a management team, and had worked together on 1999’s Any Given Sunday and the 2014 Annie movie.
“[Foxx and his managers] seemed to know that there was a theoretical possibility that she could do it, even though she was known to be retired,” Gordon said. “I think the echo between what’s happening with her character, and her own real life—it’s called Back in Action—spoke to her.”
So Diaz and Foxx became Emily and Matt, spies who fall in love over covert missions, and decide to retire when they learn they’re having a baby. Fast-forward 15 years: Emily and Matt live in the suburbs with two kids, using their espionage skills to spy on their 16-year-old daughter (McKenna Roberts). In their defense, she totally has a secret boyfriend and sneaks out to the club. Plus, they kinda miss the action. Then an old case gets dredged up, and Emily and Matt are back in it for real, in order to save their kids.
For Gordon—who launched his filmmaking career with the cult hit arcade documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and went on to direct comedies like Four Christmases, Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief, and Baywatch—it’s the first time he’s directed a film that he also wrote. “I made all these rated-R things,” Gordon explained. “The idea here was to make a movie my kid could see. He’s 14 now. He inspired one of the characters.”
In addition to being more family-friendly, Back In Action is also Gordon’s most ambitious, action-packed flick to date. At Netflix’s request, Gordon opened his film with a “show-stopping action sequence,” which was originally a set-piece on a moving train. But that wasn’t big enough for the streamer.
“Very late in the game—after we’d already prepped it and were going to shoot the train thing in Italy—Netflix said, ‘No train. Trains are slow,’ Gordon recalled with a laugh. So the writer-director called on an “old fragment of an idea” he had lying around, of a movie that opened with a plane crash. “I wrote something outrageously difficult very late in the game, and then we had to figure out how to do it. I mean, that was like two weeks out [before production began.]”
Gordon and his team got to work building a giant, rotating plane fuselage that the crew called “the rotisserie rig. The whole thing was on a gamble, and it could spin. The inside was padded so that the stuntmen could tumble around and not get hurt.”
Despite the late start, the team pulled it off. They also pulled off many other big, impressive action sequences, including a high-speed motorcycle-and-boat chase along the River Thames in London, and a gas station fight that used gas nozzles as flamethrowers. The big leg of the shoot was done on location in the U.K., but the movie’s first act—when viewers get to know Emily and Matt’s life in the suburbs—was scheduled to be filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. It was shortly after the Back in Action crew landed back in the states that tragedy struck.
“We were just getting started on [filming in] the suburbs, and then all that happened,” Gordon said. By “all that,” the director is referring Foxx’s medical emergency and hospitalization, which the actor later revealed to be a brain bleed and a stroke. As Foxx explained in his new comedy special, What Had Happened Was, on April 11, 2023, the actor had a bad headache, and asked for some aspirin. He blacked out for the next 20 days. When he came to, he was in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, where he would spend months in rehab, relearning to walk.
Gordon proceeded as best he could. That included filming scenes using Foxx’s body double in his place. TMZ was quick to snap paparazzi photos, claiming a double was replacing Foxx for the rest of the shoot. In fact, Gordon explained, the scenes filmed with Foxx’s double were used mainly as placeholders for the editing process, and were later replaced by the real Foxx after the actor recovered.
“That was actually, ultimately, stuff that’s not in the movie,” Gordon said, when asked about the TMZ report. “It was such a wild edit process, because there was a chunk of the movie missing.”
“We had all this stuff prepped, and we ended up trying to shoot whatever we could, without him being there,” Gordon explained. That included a scene where Diaz and Foxx confront their children at a local club, and get into a fight with other club goers. “I ended up coming with a whole new way to do that. I did that club scene, and the short fight in there, and replaced the [parts] where a double was used. It was a miracle, honestly, his recovery.”
When Foxx recovered, about six months later, Gordon still wasn’t able to back into production, because Hollywood was in the middle of two different strikes. But, in early 2024, Foxx was able to come back to set, and re-shoot the scenes his double had filled in for. Gordon was finally able to film the missing chunk of his film and finish up the edit. He had a final cut ready done by the summer of 2024. The release date was set for November 15, 2024. Then it got delayed. Again.
“I think the [Mike] Tyson fight landed on the same day,” Gordon said, when asked why Netflix pushed back the release. “They put it here, so there wasn’t any competing stuff at the exact same time.”
Now, finally, Gordon’s movie is releasing for Netflix audiences worldwide. It may have been a long and bumpy road, but the director doesn’t hold any grudges or ill-will—especially not toward the streamer.
“I don’t know what else place would make an original concept that was this ambitious, and didn’t have like a book it was based on,” Gordon said. “I’ve heard they’re changing their appetite for the size of movies they’re going to make, going forward. It feels like we squeaked under the wire.”