Here’s how it goes down nearly every time: He enters a location, speaks a few lines of dialogue — enough to establish character — and then something bad happens to him. That all might take place over the course of a day or two, but according to Valencia resident Dennis Keiffer, that’s the life of a stunt performer, at least for him.
Keiffer, 65, has been doing stunts in television and movies for over 30 years. He’s an American kickboxing champion turned stuntman. During a recent interview, he talked about how kickboxing kept him out of trouble when he was younger, and how his fighting got him into the movies. And he talked about how, on the screen, he pretty much always dies.
“Something bad always happens to us,” he said. “You get thrown off a building, hit by a car, lit on fire, arrested, beat up. I laugh because people say, ‘You have to put a reel together of every time you got beat up or killed or shot.’”
Keiffer actually laughed. He said such a reel of clips would be endless, with hundreds of incidents in which violence has been used against him on the screen over the course of his career.
With over 120 credits to his name on IMDb, Keiffer’s TV work includes “Fear the Walking Dead” (2021 to 2022), “Barry” (2018 to 2022), “The Mandalorian” (2020), “Criminal Minds” (2016) and “iCarly” (2009); and his film work includes “Father Stu” (2022), “The Accountant” (2016), “Furious 7” (2015), “John Wick” (2014), “Iron Man 3” (2013) and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008).
Born in Syracuse, New York, he grew up there and around the East Coast. He said he got into trouble a lot as a kid. He got into fights and hung around the wrong people.
“I was just a kid doing nothing,” he said. “One of my buddies — his dad — got him a job in Exxon uranium mining. I didn’t know what it was. It was in Wyoming, and he said, ‘Man, you’ve got to come out here, I’m making all this money.’”
Keiffer said his mother gave him $100, so he packed a few belongings and caught a series of buses to get there. Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, the job he was hoping for was no longer available. Still, he managed to find work on the oil rigs.
He said he was delivering chemicals to these oil rigs. He’d drive them out and unload 100-pound sacks of these chemicals in the freezing cold, in the wind and in the rain.
“I got in such good shape from humping 100-pound sacks of chemicals around,” he said. “I just did that, but I was getting in trouble the whole time. I drank too much.”
His troubled past would come in handy when he worked in TV and movies. When he’s playing “bad guy” roles, he said it’s always been easy to draw from his own life experiences. While he’s not proud of that part of his past, he admits it’s helped him in his acting.
But he couldn’t stay in Wyoming too long. He said he needed to get back to a city of some sort. He made his way out to Denver to seek work but found nothing.
“On the way back, I ended up going through Boulder, Colorado,” he said. “I was sitting there with the mountains right here and the river over there, and that was it. I said, ‘This is where I’m staying.’”
Keiffer found work as bricklayer there.
Still, he got into trouble when he wasn’t working.
“I had my last chance to straighten up and go find something to do to take up all this energy,” he said. “I had a great lawyer who said, ‘You’re a bricklayer, you’re working hard all day, you go to bars all night, you’ve got a lot of energy, but if you don’t find somewhere to put your energy, you’re going to be in prison.”
Keiffer had to make a decision. He’d always thought about getting into karate. So, that’s what he did.
He found a karate studio in Boulder, paid a visit, and when he saw guys inside sparring, he got chills. Keiffer, in retelling the story, said he got chills again just thinking about it.
As soon as he got into karate, he wasted no time promoting from belt to belt, upping his skill level quickly.
He spoke about fighting in tournaments, and about the rules that prohibited participants from hitting an opponent in the face or knocking someone out. Despite being taught how to fight in these tournaments, Keiffer kept getting disqualified for being too aggressive.
Ironically, he said, the people he fought often went on to win the tournaments.
After getting disqualified from one particular tournament, someone approached him, handed him his card and suggested that he try kickboxing instead.
“He told me, ‘This is not your game,’” Keiffer said. “He says, ‘If you ever want to kickbox, give me a call.’ And I thought about it for a week. I didn’t even know what kickboxing was at that point. I started checking it out, and it was great. After about two weeks, I called the guy, and I went in there and just started training with him.”
Keiffer said he took to the sport right away. Admittedly, he didn’t have any technique at first. The guy who trained him, though, was skilled, and the two of them used to spar in the ring. The trainer’s wife helped run the fights.
People would gather to watch, mostly because they wanted to see someone take on the trainer.
“He was running away from me in the ring because I hit hard,” Keiffer said. “It was a natural thing for me. When I went to hit you, I made it hurt. We all were laughing, and his wife (the trainer’s wife) finally says, ‘Well, I guess we’ve got to get him a fight.’”
Robert Sisko, who would become a longtime friend of Keiffer’s, a fellow fighter and a fellow performer in the movie and TV business, had always wanted to be an actor. But he got into karate and became a champion in his own right and crossed paths with Keiffer around the time Keiffer began kickboxing.
“I was training out of a place called Boulder Karate,” Sisko said. “Well, there was this story I would hear, and the story I was hearing was that there was this street fighter — this bare-knuckle, tournament, underground fighter — who’d been working out at Boulder Karate. People would say, ‘Oh, he’s devastating,’ and, ‘He’s knocking people out,’ and ‘Everyone’s afraid to spar with him.’”
Of course, this individual everyone was talking about was, in fact, Keiffer.
One night, during open sparring, Sisko saw Keiffer. He described him as this “muscled-out, grizzly guy.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Sisko said. “But he’s got the look, and that carried over, ultimately, to the movies.”
Sisko said that while no one else would spar with Keiffer, he volunteered to do it.
Right away, Sisko could see Keiffer’s street toughness and street mentality.
“Dennis was just strong,” Sisko said. “I would say, ‘Dennis, no, don’t do it.’ You know, if he tagged you, it was going to hurt.”
Sisko said he’s taken hits from Keiffer that caused him to go down. But it was then, he added, that they cemented their friendship.
At one point around that time, Sisko got a job as an extra on a TV show shooting in Colorado. He asked Keiffer if he wanted to join him.
“And Dennis says,” Sisko said with a laugh, “’Why would I ever want to be on a TV show?’ I told him, ‘Because it’s fun.’”
Keiffer turned the opportunity down. He was focused on fighting.
Between the ages of 27 and 32, Keiffer racked up 20 wins and just one loss. He held a championship title between 1989 and 1992.
After the loss, Keiffer wanted nothing more than to schedule a rematch with the fighter who beat him, but the guy wouldn’t do it. That ultimately would mark the end of Keiffer’s kickboxing career.
“I retired the United States super middleweight kickboxing champion,” he said. “My last fight — I lost the world title in a split decision. But that’s what got me into the movies. So, I lost a decision … It was earth-shattering to me after all the training and everything I’d done.”
Before he called it quits, Keiffer met Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, a former professional kickboxer, who wanted to train Keiffer in California, explaining that Keiffer needed someone more proven in his corner to take him even further in his career.
Keiffer went out to Van Nuys to work with Urquidez with the idea he could continue fighting with his help. When he walked into the gym, he noticed hundreds of people training there.
“I said, ‘What the hell are they doing?’ They were jumping on scaffolding and tumbling on mats,” Keiffer said. “Benny goes, ‘Well, it’s a stunt team that I’m putting together for the movies.’”
Urquidez suggested that Keiffer get in line and give it a shot. Keiffer figured, ‘Why not?’”
Out of the 300 people he said were there working out, Urquidez chose 10 of them to be on his stunt team. Keiffer was one of the 10.
“I called my girlfriend in Colorado, and I said, ‘Honey, I’m not coming home,’” Keiffer said.
He started taking Urquidez’s classes for fighting on camera. He learned right away that being fast, which is what you have to do in fighting, is not what’s best for the camera — the audience will miss anything too fast. The movements, Keiffer said, have to be big, and that went for reactions, too, which had to also be big and loud.
Keiffer’s first job as a stunt performer was on Tim Burton’s 1992 film “Batman Returns” as a member of the Red Triangle Gang. Keiffer was not in the union, but by the time anyone found out, he’d already done a decent amount of work.
“By then, it was too late to get somebody else,” he said. “I also think it’s because I was in great shape. I was working my ass off. I was trying to be good at something. And all these good things happened.”
So, the production gave him a waiver. That’s when Keiffer got into the union — on his first project.
Keiffer would go on to work steadily on movies and TV shows over the past several decades. His old sparring partner, Sisko, who hadn’t been in touch with Keiffer since he’d gotten into the stunt business, would catch up with him in the early 2000s and see just how well Keiffer was doing.
Once Sisko’s kids had grown up and moved out for college, he moved to Los Angeles to finally start pursuing his acting dreams more seriously.
“In about the year 2001, I moved here,” Sisko said. “Someone told me that Dennis Keiffer was a movie stuntman, and I’m like, ‘What? You’re kidding? He hates the movies. I invited him to be an extra. He turned me down.’”
Sisko was blown away when he’d seen all that Keiffer had done. The two reconnected and have become even closer friends today. They often ride Harley Davidsons together.
“Dennis’s career speaks for itself,” Sisko said. “He’s fought some of the biggest stars — stunt-workwise. I remember, once we reconnected, I was watching ‘Wild Wild West,’ and there he (Keiffer) is fighting Will Smith. And I’m watching ‘The Rundown’ with The Rock, and there he is flipping a whip, hitting The Rock and fighting The Rock in the middle of some desert town. And I’m just like, ‘Wow, he’s doing really well.’”
Keiffer is still busy today. Although he’s old enough to retire, he has no plans to slow down. In fact, he’s working on what he described as a “pretty big project.” He couldn’t share any details due to a contractual agreement, but he said he was having a blast.
And at the end of the day, that’s a big reason why he keeps doing it.
“I feel like every time I do a job — bad guy, good guy, though it’s usually a bad guy,” he said, “I feel like I’m a kid playing. I feel like I did when I go out and play. I just enjoy the acting part of it.”
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
