Conor McGregor Didn’t Want His ‘Road House’ Fight Scenes to Look Clean: “I Want to See Chaos!”

Conor McGregor’s fight scenes in Road House—which is now streaming on Amazon Prime—do not look pretty. They look bloody, dirty, and painful. And that’s exactly what the Ultimate Fighting Champion wanted his Road House fight scenes to look like.

“I didn’t want them to appease the MMA fanbase, because these are supposed to be bar brawls,” McGregor said in an interview for the official Road House production notes. “I didn’t want to see clean technique. I want to see people launched and the place upended. I want to see chaos!”

“Chaos” is exactly the word to describe the fights in the 2024 Road House, a remake of the 1989 action movie starring Patrick Swayze as a professional “cooler,” whose job is to break up bar fights at a rowdy club in Missouri. The new Road House movie, directed by Doug Liman, casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role, and gave him a new backstory as a notorious UFC fighter hired as a bouncer a bar in the Florida Keys. And, for added realism, Liman managed to convinced McGregor—the Irish professional mixed martial artist and boxer, and former UFC champion—to take his first-ever acting job to play Know, the movie’s antagonist.

“People have been trying to get me on board in movies for a long time, and I’ve never jumped at it. But this one hit home,” McGregor explained in that same interview. “First of all, it’s in a roadhouse, a pub, and I’ve got one myself—the best damn roadhouse on the Emerald Isle of Ireland. And to work alongside Doug, Joel [Silver, who produced the movie], and Jake and all the cast and the team… I just couldn’t say no. I wanted to be part of it.”

As Knox, McGregor is muscle-for-hire, called in to help eliminate Gyllenhaal’s character, Dalton. You see, Dalton is getting in the way of a millionaire’s (Billy Magnussen) evil plan to destroy the roadhouse where Dalton works as a bouncer. Now it’s Knox’s job to take Dalton down.

Gyllenhaal and McGregor have three major fights in the movie: one in a bar, one in a speed boat on the water, and one final UFC-style showdown in an abandoned restaurant. As stunt coordinator Garrett Warner explained in the same production notes interviews, the fights were filmed in a new way—with four “passes” for each move of the fight, all filmed from different angles. “It’s an A-B-C-D pass, which is four shots blended together,” Warner explained. “First, I had the person throw the punch. The second pass, I had the person wear a big red pad on their hand and, with the same timing, hit as hard as they could. The third pass is the hand hitting the pad for real. Then the final stage is just a background pass with nothing in the foreground, so we could combine all those shots together.”

And yes, there were a few times on set where the two men did (accidentally!) hit each other.

In a recent interview with Decider, Gyllenhaal said, “At one point, [Conor’s] talking to me by the monitor—and we shot a lot of these fights at night. Inevitably, it’s late, and we’re all talking, we’re all kind of delirious, and he’s like, [imitates Irish accent] ‘Okay, so when you throw that left, make sure you come at me real hard with that right!’ And he just pow, by mistake, hit me in the face!”

Don’t worry, Gyllenhaal got him back: “I have to hit it with a door over and over again. But it was all a matter of measurement—inches. Sometimes he’d move his face, and I hit him on the eye, actually, on the side of his eye. He got a black eye from that.”

Road House is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.