Filipino stunt coordinator on his SAG Awards-nominated work in "The Matrix Resurrections"

As the stunt coordinator for "The Matrix Resurrections," Jonathan Eusebio and his team are once again up for a Screen Actors Guild or SAG Award for Best Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture.

He held the same position in "Black Panther" which won in 2019. The Fil-Am's work as a fight and stunt coordinator and performer had been nominated several times before including for the films "300," "Dr. Strange," "The Wolverine," and "The Bourne Legacy." Eusebio says while his team makes the stunts look easy, it's "a gift and a curse sometimes."

"We put a lot of time and effort and it does look easy so it's like, 'Oh, yeah, we can do that in this amount of time.' The thing about making it look easy is that we’ve done it so many times and a lot. And we put a lot of prep. The stunt team in general really, really works hard," Eusebio shares.

In "The Matrix Resurrections," he reunited with Keanu Reeves. He also worked with the actor in the first three "John Wick" movies. "First of all, he's like a really good person, very low-maintenance, laidback. So everything people say about him is true, like the most gentle and generous person. So it's always hard to — You watch him so you idolize him when you're growing up, so in the beginning, you're kind of nervous around him. But one of my mentors was his double for the original Matrixes, so it's like full circle for me. To meet him and then be involved in this movie," Eusebio says of Reeves.

Eusebio was also the second-unit director and stunt coordinator of the recent Netflix action fim "Kate." 

Growing up, Eusebio idolized Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Sammo Hung. His parents moved from the Philippines to Canada where he was born, and they moved to the US when he was five years old. 

"My parents were nurses, so they wanted me to go to med school, or be a nurse. But I was doing martial arts pretty much my whole life and then a lot of the guys I used to train with, they were stunt guys first. They became directors, Chad Stahelski, David Leitch, they did the John Wicks and Hobbs and Shaw, Deadpool. But we all used to go to the same martial arts school. So they're my coaches. And I remember I was in school and I graduated and I was in grad school. And then I was like, I want to do stunts. So I asked them how to do it, and I just kind of fell into it."

Eusebio is working on his film directorial debut, and he describes his still-unannounced Netflix project as something that would be in the same vein as the classic action film "Die Hard."