Tory Belleci spent eight years at Industrial Light & Magic building spacecraft small enough to carry under one arm, then more than a decade on MythBusters building things large enough to need a quarry. Millions know him as the one who stood in the ring in a red jumpsuit while a bull decided what to do about it. What caught our attention is the model maker underneath the daredevil, and how neatly those two people turn out to be the same person.
Small enough to hold
Tory was born in Monterey, a California town that has always made its living from physical things: boats, nets, canneries, and the Sicilian fishing families whose surnames still line the wharf, Belleci among them. We can't say how much of that reached him, but it is hard to miss that he came out of San Francisco State's film programme in 1994 and went straight to a workshop. First came Jamie Hyneman's effects shop, M5 Industries, then ILM in Marin County, where the Star Wars prequels were still being made partly by hand. His pieces include the pod racers and the Trade Federation battleship, and his work sits inside Starship Troopers, Galaxy Quest and the Matrix sequels too.
Movie miniatures are a peculiar discipline. The object has to be convincing at a scale where the camera magnifies every brush stroke, and it has to survive being lit, moved, and occasionally set on fire. The temperament it rewards is patience, a tolerance for doing one thing nine times, and a working understanding that a fake only holds up when the physics underneath it are right. That last habit would turn out to be the whole job later on.
Nobody builds alone
Nobody builds alone
Tory Belleci has spent three decades in workshops and on sets, and the same handful of collaborators keep asking for him. Four partnerships explain a lot about how he works.
Jamie Hyneman: the shop he came back to
In 1994 he walked into Jamie Hyneman's effects shop as a stage manager. Nine years later, after ILM, he walked back in as a builder for a new show called MythBusters. Few people get hired twice by the same exacting boss; it says the first stint left an impression.
Grant Imahara: the one he recruited
When the Build Team needed a new member in 2005, Tory went back to the ILM model shop and brought in Grant Imahara, a colleague he'd known from the lab-coat days. He has spent the years since Grant's death keeping those stories in circulation.
Kari Byron: twenty years and counting
Thrill Factor, White Rabbit Project, and since 2025 a weekly podcast. Two decades of working alongside someone and still choosing to sit down with a microphone every week is its own kind of credential.
Richard Hammond: the straight man
Marooned on an island for The Great Escapists, Hammond played the saboteur who liked it there and Tory played the one who kept building ways to leave. The comedy only works if one person is serious about the engineering. That was his job.
Big enough to need a quarry
When MythBusters started in 2003, Tory joined as a builder behind the scenes, back in Jamie's shop. Partway through the second season the producers decided the builders should be on camera too, and Tory, who had chosen a career precisely because it happened off screen, found himself hosting. He has been open since about how uncomfortable that first stretch was. The more interesting part is what he did with it. He stayed a builder who happened to be filmed, and the audience could tell. The Build Team earned trust because the cameras caught the mistakes as well as the booms, and the show's willingness to retest a myth when fans disputed it came from the same place a model shop does: you don't argue with the result, you fix the build.
The scale moved quickly. Early myths fit on a bench in the shop. Within a few seasons the team was building ramps in the desert, strapping rockets to cars and, in one famous afternoon, packing a cement truck with 850 pounds of explosive and watching it stop existing. For someone who had spent years making one tiny engine pod look real under a lens, this was the same craft with the aperture opened all the way.
The variable in his own experiment
Tory's reputation as the show's daredevil is deserved (he has been dragged behind a horse for a myth and has worn red in front of a charging bull), but the word undersells what was going on. On a programme about whether claims hold up, somebody has to be the test subject. A builder who volunteers for that is making a particular statement: I made the rig, so I'll stand in it. There is an integrity to that which fans felt even if they never named it, and it's a form of leadership that rarely gets called leadership. Going first lets everyone else calibrate.
It also explains why he reads as trustworthy in a way few television hosts do. His expertise was always demonstrated live, sometimes at speed, usually in a helmet.
What he keeps and what he blows up
When the show wrapped in 2016, Tory bought the 1973 Camaro that had carried so many of the team's car myths, and he kept a small museum of objects from the set: the knife from a pirate stunt, a shield from the Archimedes death ray build, a skull from a punch-power test. Around the same time he was running a web series, Blow It Up, in which people sent him objects loaded with bad memories and he drove them into the desert and detonated them on the owner's behalf.
Put those two facts side by side and you get a model maker's theory of things: objects hold what happened in them. The good ones belong in the garage. The bad ones deserve a proper send-off, with a countdown. It's a generous idea dressed as a stunt, and it's very him.
Good company
Across thirty years, the people Tory works with keep coming back for more of him. He returned to Jamie's shop nine years after first walking in as a stage manager. He recruited Grant Imahara from ILM to the Build Team in 2005, and has spent the years since Grant's death in 2020 making sure the stories keep being told. He and Kari Byron have now hosted three shows and a weekly podcast together. And when Amazon stranded him on a Panamanian island with Richard Hammond for The Great Escapists, the casting worked because the two build differently: Hammond chases speed, Tory builds for pulling power, and Tory is the one actually trying to get off the island. The practical man in a comedy of excess is a hard part to play, and he's good at it because he isn't playing.
- A spacecraft you could carry under one armIndustrial Light & MagicPod racers and a Federation battleship for the Star Wars prequels. The discipline: make something tiny survive a lens that magnifies every brush stroke.[1] [6]
- A truck that stopped existingMythBusters, season twoA cement truck packed with 850 pounds of explosive in a quarry. The same craft of making the impossible physically real, with the aperture opened all the way.[3] [4]
- A whole island as the workshopThe Great Escapists, AmazonMarooned with Richard Hammond, building machinery from wreckage. Where Hammond built for speed, Tory built for pulling power: the practical builder, now at landscape scale.[3]
Still saying yes
Here is the shape of the current chapter. Motor MythBusters put him with two new co-hosts and a garage full of car myths. The Explosion Show gave him the thing he's best known for as a format of its own. Mythfits, launched with Kari in 2025, lets him be the archivist of a television moment that mattered to a generation of kids who later became engineers. And then there's Jackass. He was a fan of that crew long before he was ever on camera, got a scene in Jackass Forever handling the pyrotechnics, and by the 2026 film was in the writers' credits, inventing stunts for other people's bodies.
That progression says something worth copying. He never left the bench; he just kept widening what counts as the bench. Three decades in, he is still the person a producer calls when an idea needs to be made real and somebody has to be willing to test it first. The craft travelled, the friends stayed, and the fun turned out to be durable. That's a career a lot of builders would be glad to have, and a way of working anyone can borrow: make the thing properly, stand behind it, and keep a few of the good pieces.