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Days after winning an Emmy, Hungarian stunt performer Gyula Tóth was back in Budapest, reflecting not on a single moment of spectacle but on the years of preparation behind it.
Budapest Reporter spoke with Tóth at ORIGO Studios, during the opening of an exhibition dedicated to animator and filmmaker Gábor Csupó. It was an apt setting for a conversation about Hungarian talent crossing into the international screen industry. The occasion celebrated one such journey; Tóth’s career offers another, built through physical performance, production discipline and an expanding domestic film sector.
Tóth shared the Outstanding Stunt Performance Emmy with Zach Roberts, Chris Cox and Jake Cox for “In the Name of the Mother,” an episode of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The award recognised the performers behind the episode’s climactic Trial of Seven sequence. The Television Academy’s official listing names the four as the category’s 2026 winners.
For Tóth, the Emmy is both a milestone and the visible result of values that are much less glamorous than the action seen on screen.
“Persistent work, humility, and perhaps never giving up our principles,” he said, summarising the road to this point. “The Emmy is obviously a crowning moment in my career – at least one of them.”
Yet the possibility of an award was not what defined the production for him. When work began on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, he said, the priority was the audience.
“The first objective wasn’t to win awards. It was to entertain people,” Tóth said. “This was a privileged project because, perhaps more than on any of my previous projects, we were given the greatest creative freedom and the preparation time needed to create something that would endure.”
That combination – creative trust and sufficient preparation – is particularly significant in stunt work. What finally appears as a few urgent seconds on screen depends on choreography, camera placement, timing, repetition and safety. The Emmy may carry the performers’ names, but the sequence it honours belongs to a deeply collaborative production discipline.
What makes a good stunt performer?
Asked how someone becomes a stunt performer, and especially a good one in Hungary, Tóth resisted the idea of a single route into the profession.
“It is a very complex thing. Everyone comes from a different background,” he said. “There are highly skilled gymnasts, dancers and martial artists who have an excellent foundation for becoming good stunt performers.”
Physical training, however, is only the beginning. Tóth placed equal emphasis on aptitude, presence and the ability to perform when the pressure becomes real.
“You also need natural ability, a strong presence, and you cannot be overcome by stage fright,” he explained. “I have met many colleagues who are extremely talented physically and have excellent movement skills, but when they hear that the camera is rolling, they freeze.”
His distinction goes to the heart of screen stunt work. Athletic ability makes an action possible; performance makes it readable. A stunt artist must understand not only how to execute a movement, but how and when it enters the frame, how it serves the scene and how reliably it can be repeated.
Tóth described this as a form of stage timing: knowing when to appear on cue and when to arrive in a scene. In that sense, the profession sits between sport and acting. Strength, agility and specialist training matter, but so do composure, spatial awareness and an instinct for the camera.
Technology changes the risk, not the need for people
The working environment has changed considerably during the span of Tóth’s career. He noted that some things stunt performers were permitted to do three decades ago would be approached differently today, while on-set safety has developed substantially.
Digital tools have also reshaped how action can be designed and completed. Tóth was careful to distinguish the longer history of computer-generated imagery from the more recent debate around artificial intelligence. When CG first entered the industry, he recalled, many assumed that physical production itself might begin to disappear.
“Everyone thought that from then on we might not need to build sets, we would not need practical effects, or even big-name actors, because faces could simply be animated,” he said. “That is not what happened.”
For Tóth, technological change has not removed the essential value of a real performer, nor the creative judgement of the people constructing a scene.
“The human factor has always played a role in successful films, and it always will.”
That observation is especially resonant in stunt work, where digital effects can extend an environment, remove safety equipment or heighten impact, but the audience’s connection to an action often still depends on weight, reaction and human presence. Technology can change the boundary of what is possible; it does not eliminate the need to make that possibility feel emotionally and physically convincing.
The Hungarian production boom that opened a door
Tóth’s own route into international filmmaking began not abroad, but at home. Hungary’s growth as a production centre in the late 2000s created the opening through which he entered the profession.
“I started my career here,” he said. “The film boom that arrived in Hungary at the end of the 2000s launched my career.”
His first project, he recalled, was the American television miniseries The Pillars of the Earth, working under Hungarian stunt coordinator Gábor Piroch. From there, the career developed gradually. Tóth would go on to work across major productions including Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, the Dune films and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
His account offers a clear answer to what “breaking through” from Hungary can mean in practice. International careers do not depend only on leaving the country. They can also begin when global productions arrive, bringing emerging professionals into contact with experienced department heads, large crews and the standards of international filmmaking.
“If Hungary hadn’t had that film boom, we wouldn’t be talking now,” Tóth said.
The opportunity alone did not build the career. His description of a good stunt performer – trained, composed, precise and able to deliver when the camera turns – also describes what is required to convert a first production into a lasting place in the industry. Still, Tóth did not edit chance out of his own story.
“I was lucky too,” he said. “As in every profession, you need luck.”
The Emmy gives public form to years of work that is usually designed to disappear into the story. But Tóth’s journey from his first Hungarian set to an award-winning return to Westeros is not simply a tale of risk or spectacle. It is a story of opportunity meeting preparation: a growing film industry, an experienced mentor, a performer ready for his mark and a team given the freedom and time to create something lasting. Technology may continue to redraw the limits of screen action, but, as Tóth sees it, the decisive element remains human.
Interview conducted in Hungarian. Quotations have been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity.
