BEING set on fire, jumping from a building or a galloping horse, and rolling cars travelling at high speed was all in a day’s work for stunt man Peter Dillon who has worked on big-budget blockbusters including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.

Having recently celebrated turning 60, he jokes that he’s ‘amazed’ he made it this far, and he’s now enjoying a different pace to life from his home near Schull where he teaches traditional Chinese martial arts and Qigong from his studio at the foot of Mount Gabriel.

‘I had never been to Schull until the day before I saw my now home, eight years ago, and straight away there was a sense that I’d found what I’d been looking for,’ said Peter.

‘I paid the deposit on the property there and then which was a bit of a dice roll but it turned out to be a good one.’

Peter has always described himself as an ‘accidental stuntman’ and, excusing the pun, says he ‘fell into it’ while on a career break from his job as a geography and German teacher in his native Dublin. 

Peter Dillon

He had a childhood dream to travel to Nepal to hike in the Himalayas, and in 1998 aged 32, he took a year-long career break to fulfil it.

‘I always intended to come back to teaching which I really enjoyed, but my travels revealed how much more I wanted to do,’ he said. 

Peter was already a qualified Kung Fu teacher in Dublin, and had visited Asia yearly to further train in Nan Shaolin Wuzuquan (Southern Shaolin 5 Ancestors Fist) since the early 90s. While travelling, he trained as a scuba diving instructor, to help fund his travels, which took a life-changing turn in New Zealand.

A chance encounter through a martial arts teacher friend, with the assistant sword master on Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring, led to Peter being offered work doing action sequences and motion capture stunts for the pick-ups on the blockbuster film.

Until then, he hadn’t thought about stunt work: ‘But I figured it would be an interesting story from my travels, so I thought, why not, and I was immediately hooked.’

He went on to carve out a hugely successful career working on Avatar (2009), The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), and Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023), Vikings, Penny Dreadful and many more.

Among the actors he’s worked with are James Nesbitt – who he met with again at last year’s Fastnet Film Festival where Peter was also part of a sword workshop – Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom, Saoirse Ronan, Eva Green, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Rodrigues, Ken Stott, and the ‘endlessly interesting’ Sir Ian McKellan.

He’s done it all, including being set on fire. ‘And yes, that’s real fire!,’ he disclosed. ‘You have to wear the same full-length underwear that F1 drivers wear. The material is soaked in a special gel, and stored in a fridge overnight, so the irony is that while you’re on fire, you’re actually freezing.’

But, after a career spanning 22 years, he needed a new adventure. 

‘Believe it or not I was getting bored. I started to look for a place that would support what I wanted to do next, and I looked the length of the Wild Atlantic Way, from Donegal to West Cork … and I finally found it, unexpectedly, in Schull.

‘I was staying in Skibbereen for nine days hoping to find a property, but had had no luck. Then on my second last day, I was talking to friends who live locally. One of them called an estate agent, who they’d been in school with. He told me he had a place that wasn’t on the market yet, and would I like to have a look. I was so close to saying no, but went along in the end, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was right.’

This is the longest he’s lived in any one place in his entire adult life which he says speaks for itself and he’s built a training hall to teach adult classes in Qigong and traditional Shaolin Kung Fu - The Five Ancestors Fist with students who come from all walks of life.

‘Wuzuquan (Kung Fu) teaches a harmonious relationship between mind, breath and functional movement,’ explained Peter. ‘A correctly aligned skeleton provides structure, while profound relaxation of the soft tissue allows power to pass uninhibited through the body.

‘Qìgōng works with focused intent (Yi), saturating the body with directed breath (Qi), to create functional change or movement within the body (Jin). A simple example would be warming cold hands. 

‘Both practices require a healthy discipline, encourage healing within the body, and help develop a brand new internal relationship with our often neglected deeper self. Given my journey, it’s thanks to these practices that I’m still vertical.’

He’s still on that journey and is now in the early stages of writing a book. 

‘Various things conspired to give me more time recently, including a total hip replacement surgery, so I’m putting together a collection of short stories, events and adventures that are linked by that golden thread of martial arts practice.’

The theme of his book is the advantage of being nobody, which ultimately means you can be anyone you like, ideally yourself – and he’s the proof. 

‘Fear can be a useful teacher but it should never be the captain of the ship. It can prevent us from opening up, from taking a step forward and trusting that everything is there for us,’ he said. 

His ‘secret to life’ is to ‘enjoy doing, what you’re doing, while you’re doing it.’

‘I’ve had 30 years of wonderful adventures, but it’s always been about exploring life, and seeing how beautiful the world is, and how mostly lovely people are. It’s been about stripping away the unconscious limitations we think are real, unhelpful thought patterns and myopic judgements, that limit who we are, to be free, to be calm in our own skin, comfortable in our own body.’