New Zealander Zoe Bell has taken a few knocks on the way up – it comes with the territory when you’re a stuntwoman to the stars.
She looks like someone you ought to know as she mugs for the cameras while on the arm of director Quentin Tarantino. It’s unlikely, though, that you’ll recognise Zoe Bell from a movie – face-on, anyway. Bell is a stuntwoman who makes her living standing in for the star when the script calls for something acrobatic or dangerous. For obvious reasons, at such times the action tends to be shot from behind or blurred by speed.
Anyone who saw Xena: Warrior Princess during the show’s final three seasons would have witnessed Bell’s incredible exploits as she did the dirty work for Lucy Lawless (who was so impressed with her double’s work that when the long-running show ended, she shouted Bell and her brother Jake an overseas holiday).
However, Bell’s last job was a flying leap away from the New Zealand-shot Grecian spoof. During a visit to California on her way to Canada last year, she landed the part of actress Uma Thurman’s stunt double in Tarantino’s two-part kung-fu revenge flick, Kill Bill, volume one of which opens in New Zealand next month.
The tall, sometime national gymnast and martial artist from Auckland is happy to make stars look good while remaining in their shadow. It’s the physical action she likes, especially stunts involving “flying” and balletic fight sequences. Soon after landing the Thurman role (“Quentin kinda liked the fact that I fell on my arse and got up and did it again”), Bell was sent to Beijing, where most of the movie was shot, to work with a Chinese stunt team under fight choreo-grapher Yuen Wu Ping, whose credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix films and a host of Chinese titles. Working with Master Wu and the Chinese team was “cool … a buzz” but daunting.
“It was like going to a new high school, only scarier,” she says. “But the longer I was there, the less nervous and the less unsure of myself I became. It was brilliant right from the start, I enjoyed being that scared, because it was all so great. I was in a Tarantino movie and I was doubling Uma Thurman – I could hardly whinge about it.”
After a few weeks of training, the intense and demanding shooting schedule began and for the next couple of months 15- and 16-hour days were the norm, with one day off a week, if she was lucky. But she loved Master Wu’s fight choreography and the gracefulness of harness flying, which allows the onscreen illusion of gravity-defying leaps and the ability to run up walls.
Bell laughs. “I love all that stuff, that’s my favourite – doing stuff that looks tricky, but isn’t painful. I’ve decided I don’t like hitting the ground.”
The ground is a place often visited rather forcefully by stunties. And once Kill Bill relocated to Hollywood, she says, the action sequences were “more flying into shit as opposed to running and dancing off things. The fight style was far more Western – brawling – than the elegance of flying and wu shu.”
Last November, Bell’s career almost ended after a high-powered stunt involving a harness and wires attached to a hydraulic arm yanked her backwards (Thurman’s character, the Bride, had taken a bullet in the chest) with too much force. She missed her safety mat, landed on her stunt co-ordinator and dislocated her wrist, badly tearing ligaments. Surgery, pins, three months in plaster, rehabilitation and much pain
followed – along with the end of her active involvement in Kill Bill, although she was kept on the payroll. Ten months later and back in Auckland, Bell did her first handstand on the floor of her parents’ Ponsonby home and announced herself back in business.
“The handstand was my private milestone,” she says. “Once I passed that, then I knew it was eventually going to come right. Hands on floor – that’s the basis of what I do, because one of the skills that I have as a stuntwoman is gymnastics.”
More than that, she adds, being able to balance on her hands, to turn cartwheels, to tumble and flip is part of who she is. “I’ve been a gymnast since I can remember and I’ve been doing random handstands since before I was a gymnast. So it’s a huge identity thing for me to be able to mess around on my hands. It would be quite devastating for me not to be able to do that.”
She doesn’t much like talking about the accident; she complains that it’s making her wrist ache. But turn the talk to Tarantino and she brightens.
“He’s cool. He’s a pretty stunning guy. I hate to throw the word around, but he’s kind of a genius, you know? He’s kind of eccentric and he kinda swears a lot, which I must say I always appreciate.”
Tarantino appears like a friendly, dishevelled bear in that photo from June’s Taurus Awards, stuntdom’s answer to the Oscars. Beside him, Bell looks elegant in a borrowed black designer dress. They look like good mates. The New Zealander, I suspect, would be a breath of fresh air in Tarantino’s world and someone who can give as good as she takes.
“I feel like I formed a friendship with Quentin and a mutual respect,” Bell says. “There’s something reachable about him, even though he’s ridiculously rich and famous and all that crap. And he’s so enthusiastic and passionate.”
Bell, who turns 25 in November, represented New Zealand as a gymnast when she was 15, but stopped competing when she decided she lacked the drive to get to the top. And she was also tall for a gymnast. She gives her height today as “5ft 8.5” – “because I’m in Hollywood,” she spoofs, “so the half counts: you can say you’re five-eight or you can go for five-nine – a little trick I’ve learnt”. Bell took up martial arts as a teenager and discovered a talent for tae kwon do. She met her first stuntman among the black belts she trained with. Their tales piqued her interest, but it was her father, an Auckland doctor, who goaded her into action after treating a stuntie for a crack on the head.
“Dad gave him a Panadol and asked for a phone number,” she says, laughing. “Dad told me, ‘Swallow your pride, ring them up and tell them how good you are.’ So I rang up [stunt co-ordinator] Peter Bell and a couple of months later they were doing a pilot for Amazon High [made by the Xena production house] and needed a couple of girls in the background. That’s how I got on their books.”
She had spent around six months “doing jack-shit, having a couple of days here and there, falling over”, when Lucy Lawless’s original stunt double left the show and Bell was approached for the role, “because, I guess, I had the combination of size and shape similarity [to Lawless] with the gymnastics and martial arts. So that was it. Six weeks later the new series started and I was Xena … Lalalala!”
Bell’s life on and off set is featured in an upcoming docu-mentary about stuntwomen, Double Dare, by San Francisco film-maker Amanda Micheli, whose award-winning 1996 film Just for the Ride documented the lives of women rodeo riders. Micheli filmed Bell as she worked on Xena, at home with her family, leaving for Canada to look for stunt work (she never got there) and throughout the shooting of Kill Bill. It was through Micheli, in San Francisco, that Bell heard that Tarantino was looking for stunt doubles for Thurman and Daryl Hannah.
“Weird how things things work out, eh?”
A few weeks after our interview, with a new US work visa under her belt, Bell was heading back to the US to take up a job doubling Milla Jovovich (Joan of Arc) in a late-21st-century science-fiction action thriller called Ultraviolet, to be directed by Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium). It will be shot almost entirely in Shanghai over an eight-month period and Bell is excited about getting back to work. And after that, what then?
“I’m not much of a see-into-the-future person,” she says. “To be completely honest, I mean, eight months from November – I don’t think I’ve ever thought that far ahead. It’s hard to even imagine me in Shanghai.
“I really enjoy being a stuntwoman, but I think my wrist was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I’d rather be able to move around for the rest of my life than get paid well for the next couple of years and not be able to do it any more. But I do enjoy doing what I do and I really enjoy the industry I’m in. When I just look at the last year of my life … it’s ridiculous I get paid to do it!”
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