Reblogging not just because special effects are cool but because body doubles, stunt doubles, acting doubles, talent doubles — all the people whose faces we’re not supposed to see but whose bodies make movies and tv shows possible — these people need and deserve more recognition. We see their bodies onscreen, delight in the shape and motion of those bodies, but even as we pick apart everything else that goes on both on and behind the screen, I just don’t see the people who are those bodies getting the love and recognition they deserve.
We’re coming to love and recognize actors who work in full-body makeup/costumes, such as Andy Serkis, or actors whose entire performances, or large chunks thereof, are motion captured or digitized (lately sometimes also Andy Serkis!). But people like Leander Deeny play an enormous part in making characters such as Steve Rogers come to life, too. Body language is a huge part of a performance and of characterization. For characters/series with a lot of action, a stunt person can have a huge influence on how we read and interpret a character, such as the influence Heidi Moneymaker has had on the style and choreography of Black Widow’s signature fighting style. Talent doubles breathe believability and discipline-specific nuance into demanding storylines.
Actors are creative people themselves, and incredibly important in building the characters we see onscreen. But if we agree that they’re more than dancing monkeys who just do whatever the directors/writers say, then we have to agree that doubles are more than that, too. Doubles make creative decisions too, and often form strong, mutually supportive relationship with actors.
Image 1: “I would like to thank Kathryn Alexandre, the most generous actor I’ve ever worked opposite.”
Image 2: “Kathryn who’s playing my double who’s incredible.”
[ Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany on her acting double, Kathryn Alexandre, two images from a set on themarysue, vialifeofkj ]
I’ve got a relationship that goes back many, many years with Dave. And I would hate for people to just see that image of me and Dave and go, “oh, there’s Dan Radcliffe with a person in a wheelchair.” Because I would never even for a moment want them to assume that Dave was anything except for an incredibly important person in my life.
[ Daniel Radcliffe talking about David Holmes, his stunt double for 2001-2009, who was paralysed while working on the Harry Potter films. David Holmes relates his story here. Gifset viasmeagoled ]
With modern tv- and film-making techniques, many characters are composite creations. The characters we see onscreen or onstage have always been team efforts, with writers, directors, makeup artists, costume designers, special effects artists, production designers, and many other people all contributing to how a character is ultimately realized in front of us. Many different techniques go into something like the creation of Skinny Steve — he’s no more all Leander Deeny than he is all Chris Evans.
But as fandom dissects the anatomy of scenes in ever-increasing detail to get at microexpressions and the minutiae of body language, let’s recognize the anatomy in the scenes, too. I don’t mean to take away from the work Chris Evans or any other actors do (he is an amazing Steve Rogers and I love him tons), but fandom needs to do better in recognizing the bodies, the other people, who make up the characters we love and some of our very favourite shots of them. Chris Evans has an amazing body, but so does Leander Deeny — that body is beautiful; that body mimicked Chris Evans’s motions with amazing, skilled precision; that body moved Steve Rogers with emotion and grace and character.
Fandom should do better than productions and creators who fail to be transparent about the doubles in their productions. On the screen, suspension of disbelief is key and the goal is to make all the effort that went into the production vanish and leave only the product itself behind. But when the film is over and the episode ends, let’s remember everyone who helped make that happen.
[ Sam Hargrave (stunt double for Chris Evans) and James Young (stunt double for Sebastian Stan, and fight choreographer), seen from behind, exchange a fistbump while in costume on the set of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Image vialifeofkj ]
I applaud these guys as much as the suit actors in my japanese tokusatsu shows. They do just as much work.
All of this. Also anyone who says VFX is ruining films needs to learn about film history and then apologise to everyone for being simultaneously ignorant and arrogant.
Stuntmen James Young (The Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes) and Aaron Toney (The Falcon/Sam Wilson) about Sebastian’s badass-ness.
“I worked with Sebastian a lot during prep, training him to do the fights. He never fought like this before on film! And he gave me a lot of confidence, as well – like: ok, sweet, I need to overlap this. I need to walk like him…”
Captain America: The Winter Soldier – Learning the Dance clip
#always reblog
Interviewer: Did you do a lot of your own stunts?
Anthony Mackie: I did a bunch of the stuff leading up to the stunts. I tried to do one stunt and I ran into a parked car, face-first.
Interviewer: The directors were telling me— I asked if there were any close calls and that was the one situation they brought up!
AM: [Laughs] No, but they tricked me. First of all, no one— if I tell you to fly, you’re not going to know how to fly ‘cause as humans, we don’t fly. So they tell me they’re going to raise me up ten feet and let me go. I swing in, land on my feet, and walk and talk…. so they pulled me up ten feet and said ‘how do you feel?’ and I said ‘I feel good!’ But I keep going up! They pull me up forty feet off the ground and I’m like ‘THIS DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT!’ [Laughs] And they let me go. And I’m coming down at like….mach 2, right? And I look at Chris [Evans]’s face and he goes… “You’re going to die.”
Chris Evans on Captain America’s fighting style in The Winter Soldier (x)
In between the first Captain America movie and The Avengers, I had played the Captain America video game; and the way Cap moves in the video game, there’s a fluidity and it’s very acrobatic. It’s very aerial. He uses his environment, and it’s almost this beautiful, smooth dance, and when I first met with the [directors], I said, “Have you played the video game?” And I swear to God, they said: “You know what? We referenced the video game, too.” I said, “Good, good, we’re on the same page. But that means we need to incorporate a little bit more of an acrobatic approach to fighting.” And so we put myself in gymnastic classes, which is something I always wanted to do – kind of, anyway [laughs]. I mean, I wanted to go play on like, the balance beam, but it was more like tumbling, essentially. Parkour-style gymnastic stuff. Flipping, and spinning, and just kind of getting a sense of your body in the air. So we did about two months of that. We did two months, a few hours each day, and it was invaluable. It really lends itself to a lot of those fight scenes.
Chris Evans, I never agreed to love you this much.
oh my fucking god you huge ass dork ilu so much staaaaahp
One of the things that Hollywood seems incapable of appreciating is that actors in movies with special effects have to either 1. act to nothing because literally nothing is there, 2. react and pretend something is happening because again, nothing is happening, and 3. interact with characters that will later be put into the scene with special effects.
This example is just one of many. Think about what you’ve seen, not only in the past decade or so of CGI, but before then when Star Wars (the originals) revolutionized the whole of sci-fi fantasy films. Hollywood rolls its eyes, reaps the benefits with the ‘popcorn movies’ but rarely (if ever) rewards them. The Return of the King was a fluke that probably will never be repeated. It’s one reason I will always ALWAYS talk about the acting skills of those in these films (and the directing prowess), because it isn’t easy. At all.
So thank you to all the actors, directors, production teams, special effects teams, etc. You made it possible and I, for one, am grateful.
knitting in the dark 