West Bend Student Invited to the Set of ‘6 Underground’

By Elise Marlett, Editor in Chief

A local student’s hobby of six years landed him the opportunity to watch a blockbuster action movie being filmed.

On an excursion with his parkour group that meets through the area YMCA, West Bend West High School sophomore Ian Williams visited the set of the Netflix film “6 Underground” in the summer of 2019. The actor Ben Hardy, who played one of the lead roles alongside Ryan Reynolds, invited Williams’ parkour coach and several other parkour enthusiasts from across the country to visit the set.

“Ben Hardy is part of a parkour group called Storror,” Williams said. “He invited a bunch of these British people and my instructor was one of the people who was in that group. (He) invited a bunch of people in the facility to come along and I was one of those people so we got flown out to the set.”

Williams was able to meet director Michael Bay, who is known for his use of stunt work in big-budget action movies, including “Transformers,” “Bad Boys,” and “The Rock.”

“It was wild,” Williams said. “Since Michael Bay is one of the directors of (‘6 Underground’), you  really get a sense of how he uses explosions. There were a lot of packaged IEDs for certain movie scenes and that’s probably the craziest thing.”

Taylor Glenski, a participant in the trip, remarks that the end product of a movie is nothing like what it looks like in real life. 

“In the movie it looks completely different,” Glenski said. “Just the editing makes the scene way nicer looking than what it actually is. In one of the scenes it was really dusty, like dirt was kicked up because of cars, but in the movie it looks really clean.”

Both boys were excited to watch the movie when it came out in December 2019. 

“When you’re watching it, you’re like ‘I saw that scene! I was in the background!,’” Williams said.

(Photos from the set of “6 Underground” courtesy of Ian Williams.)