Page 69 - OVATION Magazine (Issue 1)

W H O T O K N O W Double
Take
One of Holly- wood’s hottest stunt performers reveals how to gethitbyacar and take down the Rock.
In 2006, Jahnel Curfman
got a call from her agent about a “super-secret film project” that needed motion- capture performers.“I’d just finished a stint as a Laker
Girl, and I’d been dancing professionally for about nine years, so I was really ready for something new,” Curfman recalls. She got the job and soon found herself working with a stunt team on Avatar. Stunts appealed to the Arizona tomboy, who’d grown up riding dirt bikes and shoot- ing guns in the desert. So she trained in weaponry, wirework, and martial arts,“to get the prettiness out of my move- ments and look more like a fighter.” Mission accomplished. Curfman has since doubled for everyone from Sandra Bullock (Bird Box) to Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies), and this
year she received an Emmy
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MARC SEROTA