Ride of the Week: Cruising Along PCH With Hollywood’s Kirk Taylor

For Cars, Movies and Cool… it’s Fireball Tim!

It seems that nowadays, people want to tell their stories more often. Or maybe it’s just that, thanks to the web, they now can in a variety of ways. 

Long before Jerry Seinfeld’s car show, I did a thing called 5Minute Drive where I took celebs for drives in cool cars and got their stories. It was fun, unique and in-depth. And now, there are a multitude of shows online that are doing it.

So, it’s time to evolve.

When actor Kirk Taylor’s people reached out to me to do a Vlog episode about Taylor and an article here, I jumped as I always do. It’s fun to meet new creative people who are making a difference. So, we got together and this is how it went.

Taylor has been an actor for a long time and he’s been fortunate to have worked with some amazing people over the years. His first story involved Charles Bronson, where he played a heavy opposite to the massive gun toting vigilante in “Death Wish 3.” Bronson pushed him to get intense, resulting in a rifle-powered pistol blowing a Hollywood hole on Taylor. He was fine, but the leather jacket he was wearing was blown to smithereens.

“It nearly made me sick when I looked at what had become of the jacket,” mentioned Taylor. 

As we drove his 2017 Kia Niro up PCH, the last thing on our mind was stopping for gas, as it got 51 miles per gallon. So, we kept moving. 

Next up was an audition for Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” He told a hysterical story about getting shot in the rump that, although very funny, is not appropriate for this article so you’ll have to watch my Vlog, Episode 893. Yes, he got the job. 

Taylor’s stints as an actor also included the cult hit, “The Last Dragon” in which he was pulled from an extra to a fighting roll as one of Sho’nuff’s henchmen. Yes, that was the bad guy’s name: Sho’nuff. 

But nowadays, Taylor is doing a combination of acting, teaching acting and music — all of which landed him a roll opposite Chaka Khan in the upcoming musical film “Revival,” out this Easter. 

I got the sense that Taylor was a kind, gentle soul in the mix of Hollywood’s violent realm from the past. The same goes for most of my friends who are stuntmen to Hollywood’s elite, including Jeff Jensen, Stuart Wilson, Simon Rhee and many others. 

The tough, bad guys in film are always the kindest people I’ve ever met. And maybe it’s because they love cars, eh? 

Regardless, pretty sure that Taylor is still driving that 2017 Kia and hasn’t visited a gas station in the last two weeks or more. Times are a changin’ and gas stations may become a thing of the past. Will millennials not know what it’s like to fill ’er up? 

Big thanks to Taylor for hanging out with me and cruising Malibu’s scenic PCH. We hit Latigo for some beach time and had a blast. If you’re an agent or in PR, send me your celeb peeps and we’ll do the same.

And be on the lookout for Taylor in his upcoming film, where he sings a solid tune. Sho’nuff.

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