The Bumblebee stunt team showed up for rehearsals for the latest in the Transformers movie franchise. They were preparing to film the stunt. The rehearsal that day involved 11 stunt drivers and 3 passengers – all men. One of the drivers was told to wear a wig to double for a woman. There was no female stunt drivers included.
Annabel Wood has performed stunts in some of Hollywood's biggest hits including Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), Wonder Woman, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and The Mummy, and TV work is no less impressive with her 3 year stint on Game of Thrones.
In her audition for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2104) stunt actress Janene Carleton had to prove that she could ride a horse — something she'd been doing competitively since childhood — but in an "ape-like" position. "You just have to hunch your shoulders and squat down a little...
Crystal Riley uses the stunts of Helen Gibson in her talk entitled The Stunts of Helen Gibson: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Join Crystal while she discusses tales of peril and possibility, jeopardy and chance; of flirting with danger and being willing to lose it all in this Odd Salon lecture.
The practice is called wigging: stuntmen don wigs and women’s clothing to resemble female actors while filming risky action scenes.
Camera angles, special effects and editing preserve the illusion that it is a pulchritudinous star leaping off a building or driving through a window rather than a man in drag.
Audiences...
Lead stunt double for Gal Gadot in the film Wonder Woman, Caitlin Dechelle was responsible for the kickass stunts and fighting scenes that brought the film to life. A martial artist from the age of six, she has 95 world titles. To find out more, I put 20 questions to Caitlin about martial arts, stunts and working on Wonder Woman.
Remember the famous scene in Sholay where Hema Malini shouts “Chal Dhanno!” as she is chased by Gabbar Singh’s men? While the audience rooted for the actor, the real hero of that iconic action sequence was stuntwoman Reshma Pathan who rode the speeding cart. She has spent 3 decades as body double to Bollywood’s leading ladies.
When you’re drooling over Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) reserve some drool for Stacey Carino, who, as Fox’s stunt double, did a lot of the legwork. In her six-year career Stacey has worked on movies as varied as Bruce Almighty, The Jane Austen Book Club, and Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgTi2qa34BY
There are a small number of gutsy Hollywood stars who insist on doing their own stunt work. But because most A-listers are happy to hand the really dangerous stuff over to the professionals, stunt doubles are always in demand in Tinseltown.
Unfortunately, not every stunt has a happy ending....
It's hard to gauge the full effect that Wonder Woman's success will have on the film industry. Studios and producers will no doubt have noticed that investing in a female-driven summer tentpole payed off big and that the conventional Hollywood wisdom that says women can't carry a blockbuster just doesn't...