Zoë Bell at the 26th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 19, 2020. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Zoë Bell has spent the better part of 25 years being other people — at speed, on fire and 20-odd stories above the ground. She has been Xena. She has been Uma Thurman’s Bride. She has been Sharon Stone falling 23 stories onto an airbag “the size of a stamp.”
She has also had a career like no other: a girl from a small island off a small country, with no film industry connections, who vaulted into Hollywood; a woman making her way through a male-dominated profession that has only just begun to get its due; a performer who became a stunt double, then an actor, producer, coordinator and now, at the point where many stunt careers begin winding down, a director.
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But for the past few years, Bell’s life has been less about motion than stillness. She has been living in Colorado, not Los Angeles, in a house she bought almost impulsively before the world shut down.
“I went through some stuff right before the lockdown and bought a house on a whim,” she says. “The thought of owning something outside of L.A. filled me with peace.”
The plan was to stay two weeks, then leave for Vancouver for five months on a movie. Instead, COVID hit. The two weeks became years. In hindsight, Bell can now see what she could not fully name at the time.
“I’ve sort of been in some form of hiding,” she says. “Hiding and healing.”
Which is why the Oldenburg Film Festival’s career tribute arrives at a strange and almost perfectly timed moment.
Germany’s leading indie fest has long made a specialty of outsiders and oddballs — artists who arrived without pedigree, training programs or an obvious industry slot and built the career anyway. Bell qualifies on every count.
Her first instinct, characteristically, was to turn the honor down.
“I don’t feel deserving of this at all,” she told Oldenburg festival director Torsten Neumann when he reached out. Then he sent an email laying out what he intended to celebrate. Bell read it back to herself. “I was like, wow, I guess I have had kind of quite a great [career]. So I said, ‘Okay, fuck, I’m going to step into that.’”
Zoë Bell got her start as the stunt double for Lucy Lawless in ‘Xena: Warrior Princess‘ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival Bell grew up on Waiheke Island, a ferry ride from Auckland, the daughter of two parents in the medical field. Hollywood stunt work was not on the careers-advisor list.
“There wasn’t an awareness of stunts being a realistic career,” she says. “It just wasn’t part of my reality.”
But kinetic action was. From age two, Bell was a trampoline obsessive — “it was like my best friend until my brother was born” — climbing trees, doing gymnastics, watching diving, ice skating, anything that looked like flight. “I was actually convinced, when I was little, that if I put my mind to it, got my head just right, I could literally fly,” she says. “Maybe I’ve always just been chasing that.”
She left school good at three things: English, photography and PE. “There’s no world I could imagine where those three things could apex into a career,” she says. She got a job at a Waiheke vineyard and started taekwondo “because I liked the idea of throwing my legs around.” Staying late to watch the black belts train, she discovered some of them were stunt men.
“For the first time in my life, I was smitten with something that could be a career. I felt like, holy shit, I could be really useful in that role.”
Then fate intervened. A man was admitted into her father’s surgery with a concussion. He was a stuntman. Bell’s dad came home with a phone number.
“He said: ‘I’m sick of hearing you bleat on about it [becoming a stuntwoman]’,” Bell recalls. He said: “‘There’s two options: either you wake up with exactly the life you’ve got now, or you wake up a stunt woman. But if you don’t make the phone call, becoming a stunt woman isn’t an option.’”
She made the call. And landed her first gig: A TV pilot called Amazon High from Renaissance Pictures, the indie production outfit set up Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert and Bruce Campbell that was busy churning out episodes of Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. Amazon High never got the green light to series, but Bell started getting work on the main shows.
For a while she was a day player — “they’d call me when they needed a villager to fall off a roof, or an extra soldier.” Then Xena lost its lead stunt double. Bell had the height, the size and, as she says “the right combination of gymnastics and martial arts” to double Lucy Lawless. She was still a teenager.
“I can remember going home, being like, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m going to be Xena,’” Bell says.
The Xena set became her film school. “I call it my Xena-versity,” she says. Wirework entered her nervous system. Fight choreography came at industrial speed. One of her first stunts in the Xena costume — a jerk-back through breakaway furniture — became something she jokes she would later do “1,700 times a week.”
But the most important lessons came from watching Lucy Lawless. “The way she’d be on set profoundly informed how I wanted to be on set,” Bell says. “With Lucy there was never any separation from the crew, there was no hiding in the trailer. She knew that, when you’re the star, when you’re in 90 percent of the shots, the energy you bring to set affects everybody’s day.”
Bell’s next jump was to Hollywood. Her trampoline was Quentin Tarantino.
Bell’s first meeting with him is captured on film, in Amanda Micheli’s documentary Double Dare, a portrait of Bell and legendary stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, the double to Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman. The doc brought Bell to Los Angeles, where she wound up at a Kill Bill audition. She assumed she had no chance of landing it. “But I thought: the boys will definitely buy me beers when I go home because I auditioned for a Tarantino movie.”
She walked into the room, saw Kill Bill co-star Daryl Hannah and [Uma Thurman’s then husband] Ethan Hawke on exercise bikes. “I was completely star stuck, I thought: that’s Splash, that’s Reality Bites“
She nailed the audition. Tarantino was impressed by how she would repeat a stunt again and again until she landed it — so Bell was off to China to shoot Kill Bill Vol.1 and Kill Bill Volume 2 back to back.
Uma Thurman, Zoë Bell on the set of ‘Kill Bill’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival On set, Tarantino treated her like actor, not a stuntwoman.
“As far as he’s concerned, anything in front of the lens is telling the story,” Bell says. “So I wasn’t the Bride stunt double. I was a facet of the Bride.”
In the House of Blue Leaves fight sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1, Bell, as Thurman’s The Bride has to run full speed up a banister, holding a samurai sword, to attack O-Ren [Lucy Liu]. Bell technically nailed the run, but Tarantino pulled her aside. “He asked: ‘What’s your motivation?’,” she recalls, “which was like what we stunt people would say as a joke.” But Tarantino was serious. She answered: “‘I want to get to the next floor.'” Quentin pushed: “What’s up there? O-Ren. Why do you want to get to O-Ren? I want to kill her. But Why?'”
“Now I’m getting goosebumps just remembering,” Bell says. “I said to Quentin: ‘Because she fucked up my life, and I want to slaughter everybody.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, we’re ready to go. Can we roll cameras, please?’”
Then came Death Proof. Tarantino told her he was writing a movie about a man who kills women with his car, and that he wanted Bell and Monica Staggs, Hannah’s Kill Bill double, in the film. They assumed they’d be background girls in a bar.
Instead Bell got a lead role, playing Zoë Bell. Tarantino wrote the role for her.
“I was terrified,” she says. “You don’t want to be the person that screws up a Tarantino film. And I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can act.’” Tarantino’s direction was simple: learn the lines inside out and backwards, take no acting classes. “I know what I want from you, and I know how to get it.”
Bell said it was a big adjustment, learning to look at the lens, not away from it — “I was fighting all my instincts to hide my face,” she says. “It was the first time I felt like the lens could see me, not just my physical performance. The camera was looking into Zoë. That was definitely the most terrifying thing.”
From left: Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in ‘Death Proof’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival Compared to that, being strapped to the hood of a Dodge Challenger doing 90 mph was a joy.
“That stunt was a real highlight, because it was the perfect example of what you get when you get the right team, the right level of experience and that sort of unspoken communication — it becomes like dancing,” she recalls. “[Stuntwoman] Tracie Dashnaw was driving and I was just thinking: how far can I push it? The only time I got scared, actually, was when we were driving the back. Someone else took the wheel and was driving normally. He hit the brakes, didn’t feather the brakes like Tracie would, and I nearly flew off, had to catch myself on the edge of the bonnet. I felt: Oh shit! What we’re doing is dangerous! We were going 10 miles an hour, and we’ve been going 90, but that was the first time I felt it.”
Bell draws a line between genuine fear and performance anxiety. Genuine fear comes early, when she hears what the stunt is. By the time the camera rolls, she wants to have metabolized it into work.
On Catwoman, prepping for a 23-story fall, she stepped onto the roof and peeked down at the airbag below. “It was like the size of a stamp,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s not going to save me. That’s just to make other people feel better.’”
So she asked to be clipped in and sat on the edge, in her memory, for 45 minutes to an hour. “Just to strip the novelty, the fear out of it. So the height is no longer novel. And therefore, not scary anymore.”
Acting, oddly, was harder.
“Stunts appealed so much because I got to perform without having to access all that heady stuff,” she says. “Then you get into acting, and it’s like, oh, now I have to expose all those emotions. I have to be feminine. I have to be vulnerable. I have to be able to be sexual. That’s scary.”
Bell put that exposure to the test on Josh C. Waller’s Raze, the 2013 low-budget action movie she produced and starred in, an underground fight picture that shot 19 action sequences in 30 days. Bell was in nearly every frame, producing, performing and helping shape the fights on almost no sleep.
It remains one of the projects she is proudest of, not because it was easy but because it forced her to move beyond the body-as-instrument logic of stunt work.
“Acting is not easy — breaking down a script and figuring out where your character starts and finishes,” she says. “It’s a very heady experience, and I’m a heady person.” Raze, she says, was the first time she recognized “I had a voice, and I could infuse it further up the chain.”
Hollywood has changed since Bell arrived. More roles are written for women in action. More women coordinate stunts. And the Academy has finally created a category for stunt design, with the first Oscar to be awarded next year.
“We’re finally being recognized as a department that speaks to the storytelling of film and TV,” she says, approvingly, “because [we] don’t just turn up and tick boxes. It is an art. It’s not just a sport.”
Zoë Ball was the stunt coordinator on Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood.’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival Bell’s Oscar stunt reel would include, as a performer, her Death Proof car stunt and, as a stunt coordinator, the “Nazi burn flamethrower scene” in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, a sequence in a mock WW2 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Rick Dalton, in which he scorches a row of SS men.
“We had eight performers burning, with two safeties each, so eight stations and a flamethrower blasting direct heat,” Bell recalls. “It was so big and so hot. When we’d yell cut and everyone’s running in with the extinguishers, I’m like, ‘is everyone okay?’”
The high was different from performing. “When I do something well as a performer, I tend to look for other people to be proud of what I did,” she says. “When I’m coordinating or directing, I get to be the one being proud of other people.”
Bell says her ideal on-camera job remains “to be an actor who’s performing her own stunts.” But she’s discovered a new passion: Directing. She has gotten behind the camera for a short film campaign for New Zealand’s Arnott’s Biscuits (Taika Waititi hired her), and directed a campaign for The Wilderness Society, starring Joel Egerton, Rosario Dawson and Cate Blanchett. After shooting her first commercial, Bell says she walked off set thinking: “God, I feel really useful in this role. That’s the first time I felt that since discovering stunts.”
Then life intervened.
Around the midpoint of shooting Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and in the 18 months that followed, Bell says she went through a series of “foundationally shaking experiences.” Her partner nearly died. Her mother died. She became pregnant, lost the baby and lost the ability to have children.
“It threw me in a way that — look, I’ve been through some weird stuff, and I’ve been through some sad stuff, but I’ve never not been able to cope,” she says. “And not being able to cope was terrifying. That was profoundly unsettling.”
Then came COVID. Then the strikes. Then Colorado.
Bell did not disappear. She coordinated reshoots on Thor: Love and Thunder, coordinated and second-unit directed Time Bandits, developed scripts and kept working. But she was doing it, she can see now, from a protected distance. “I was kind of faking it from afar so I could stay safe,” she says.
The Colorado house became the place where she stopped moving long enough to understand what had happened. “I didn’t consciously take a break,” she says. “But I look back now and I think I needed that.”
At the start of this year, Bell said something out loud to her husband: “I need to get back in the mix. I need to actually start getting back in the conversation.”
Then Oldenburg called.
The tribute and the timing — Bell is in pre-production for Free Fall, a thriller planned as her feature debut as a director — felt perfect.
“I feel really like on the precipice of the next thing,” Bell says. “This is round two. Here we go.”
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