Discovery Channel Magazine: Interview with a Stuntwoman

Discovery Channel Magazine, September 2014

If the golden age of daredevillery passed in the 1970s, one can argue it lives on in the movies, where stunt performers attempt ever more remarkable and audacious feats – the difference being that they do it to make someone else look good rather than themselves.

Zarene Dallas is an accomplished stunt double whom you may well have seen, without ever knowing it, in films like The Counselor – a Ridley Scott movie in which she was a stunt double for Cameron Diaz – and The Fast and the Furious 6, in which she doubled for not one star but two: Michelle Rodriguez and Gal Gadot. That scene where someone rides a Ducati motorbike and jumps off it onto a moving army truck? That’s Zarene. “That Ducati,” she says with pride, “wasn’t even in the shops yet.”

The path in to stunt work is different for everybody, but for Zarene it began with a love of horses in her native Australia. “In the beginning, I lived on horses all my life,” she says. “I don’t want to say I am a thrillseeker on horseback, but I was always interested in pushing parameters.” When she moved to England, where she now lives, she learned a range of horseback tricks – hanging off the side, going all the way around a horse’s body as it runs, standing on two horses – “and I thought: I really want to ride horses in films.”

Research showed her that in order even to ride a horse in a film, she would have to be British Equity stunt-registered, which in turn required being trained in six disciplines. This she did, for many years. “You’ve got to be at a very high level in many different sports, to have coaching, to pass exams and become a brown belt in martial arts, to get on the Equity stunt register,” she says. She succeeded just under three years ago.

From there, things started to happen very quickly. “Within the first year, I had a pinch yourself moment,” she says. “I was riding a Spanish horse filming for Ridley Scott, doubling Cameron Diaz, riding at a gallop with cheetahs all around me.” The cheetahs, she adds, were filmed separately, but still: not a bad start.

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