This actress/social media influencer Busy Phillips wrote a book recently about how, when she was on the show “Freaks and Geeks,” she was hit so hard by her co-start James Franco, that he knocked the wind out of her. Uma Thurman, in Kill Bill, went to the Times and talked about how she almost died in the car sequence when the car crashed at 40 miles an hour. Quentin Tarantino told Diane Kruger he had to actually choke her for Inglorious Bastards, that a stunt wouldn’t look as real on film as the sight of her actually losing consciousness.
This should not be happening at all. I don’t understand how this happens. Staging and performing a fight and/or physical violence is actually a craft, and filming a TV show or film is incredibly technical and precise. There’s no room for someone to be so lost in their art or the moment that they lose control. People go to drama school and receive training on how to do it. Husband is a fight choreographer among other things, and he has always taught me, that the “victim,” in any stage fight, is the one who leads the action and provides the reaction. You always want to be safe, you always want your actors to feel safe, so when I read or hear about stories of these women being endangered like the anecdotes above, it sounds like a bunch of amateurs are in charge and don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I can only imagine being an actress on set, not wanting to make it a big deal, not wanting to hold up production, not sure if maybe they were overreacting.