TOWN
Profile
Block Buster: Chuck Tamburro, far right, on the set of Commando
High Stakes Greenville-based stuntman Chuck Tamburro’s death-defying flights take Hollywood by storm / by John Jeter
Photograph courtesy of Chuck Tamburro
F
or a guy who can get himself killed just about any time he goes to work, Chuck Tamburro’s pretty low-key about his job. He’s a good-natured sort, a relaxed, 6-foot-2 hunk with a ready smile and enviable contentment. Calm, easygoing—all the right stuff to be one of America’s most sought-after action figures. In fact, you’ve seen Chuck before, if not his face, then his flying skills, performing aerial acrobatics in some of the biggest films of the last few dozen years. Like that time he flew a helicopter under a highway overpass in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Or when he landed aboard that research ship in the mega-blockbuster Titanic. Or the one where he chased a Marine-piloted Harrier fighter jet above downtown Los Angeles in True Lies.
Chuck’s among only a handful of top-flight stunt pilots in America, and his credits appear in more than a hundred movies and TV shows. When he’s not on some set somewhere for a couple of months at a time, he lives in Greenville with his wife of 28 years, Joree, a noted chef. They met on the set of Two Minute Warning and moved to Greenville in 1995. Today, sitting in his lightfilled home office, he’s a big-time movie star, and one with a heroic backstory. He got his first flying role in the Vietnam War, a kid from East Meadow, Long Island. “I wanted to play baseball,” he says from behind his desk, which faces wall-to-wall photos of action-packed movie stills. “And I got drafted. I went in hoping I’d be in two years and get out, but they offered me flight school, and I stayed for four years. My dad said, ‘You’d better go to flight school, or you’ll be on the ground in the jungle somewhere, and that wouldn’t be good.’” A couple of times, it wasn’t so good. As a warrant officer flying Hueys and Cobra gunships primarily out of Ninh Hòa, a coastal hamlet in southern Vietnam, he helped support America’s Republic of Korea allies. “The ROKs, we’d drop ’em off in the middle of the jungle. And they’d stay there.” He was shot down twice. Shaken, but not deterred. Back home, he got his entrée into the movie business through his uncle Charlie Picerni, a legendary stuntman himself and a fellow member of Hollywood’s elite Stunts Unlimited group. AUGUST 2015 / 57