BJ rollerblading in Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones looks like child play compared to the new hobby the oddball character played by Tim Baltz picks up in the HBO comedy series’ fourth and final season. In Episode 2, BJ is seen taking a group pole dancing lesson and performing a full routine that has him in a Spider-Man-like upside-down position at some point.
There was no stunt double, it was all Baltz in the scene, and he trained hard to master the routine. It started with a call from a producer to start doing Pilates, because he would need core strength.
“I was like, what, why? Well, you gonna learn pole dancing,” Baltz recalled during a panel discussion at the Season 4 premiere of The Righteous Gemstones. “I was excited, because it felt like an evolution of the character; I felt like each season there was something more ridiculous that BJ was getting into. It made perfect sense that this was the hobby, but I wasn’t prepared for it, so I just started pounding creatine and training hard.”
Baltz was then introduced to a top professional coach at a pole dancing studio near the series’ production offices and started learning the routine with her.
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“I told her, look, I’ll be able to do 50% of this. She’s like, nope, you’re gonna do the whole thing,” Baltz said. “The fifth time that we had met, I got upside down, I did the whole routine. And we’re like, high-five in a room full mirrors with a bunch of pole dancers around.”
On the show, BJ’s pole dancing practice is being watched by his wife Judy, played by Edi Patterson who was impressed by what she saw.
“I’ll never forget it, that’s burned in in a great way,” she said during the same cast Q&A.
Patterson revealed that she too had to take pole dancing lessons for a Season 4 storyline for her character that was eventually scrapped.
“I’m not kidding you when I say, I have such off the charts respect for it. I took two lessons myself and drove home crying,” she admitted. “I’m pretty strong, I’m pretty athletic, I like to run. That sh*t is no joke. It’s vertical gymnastics against hard things. They literally tell you your first time you’re gonna rip the skin off the inside of your thighs a lot, that’s a normal part of this. They’re like, yeah, just keep putting the salve on it.”
Patterson revealed that both she and Baltz sustained injuries during training.
“After I went twice and hurt my shoulder almost as badly as Tim hurt his after really learning to do something, I went for my third lesson. I was like, Tanya, I think I’m messed up from our first two lessons, I don’t think I’m going to master this,” Patterson said. “By the third lesson, I showed her what I could do — wasn’t a lot, guys. She goes, Okay, I’m going to choreograph some more sort of typically stripper stuff that you can do on the ground. And I was like, great.”
Concluded Patterson, “So it was about to get hot in here, but we changed the storyline.”
The post ‘The Righteous Gemstones’: How Tim Baltz Mastered Pole Dancing For BJ’s Season 4 Stunt & Actor Who Almost Joined Him As Both Got Injured appeared first on Deadline.
