Tribute Zoë Bell

While preparing for her next assignment as Lucy Lawless’s stunt double on the set of »Xena: Warrior Princess«, Zoë Bell watches Lawless perform one of her scenes. For a brief moment, she turns directly to the camera, which is capturing her for Amanda Micheli’s documentary »Double Dare« (2004), and jokes: “It’s my acting double.” That small remark, tossed off with a mischievous smile, stays with you. It sticks in your mind. After all, it raises fundamental questions about the nature of cinema: what we perceive and take for granted, and what, conversely, eludes our gaze as we watch the big or small screen.

Stuntwomen and stuntmen are the great invisible figures of cinema. They disappear behind the stars they double for. They have to; that is their job, or at least a crucial part of it. After all, the illusion must be maintained that the fights and chases, the falls and crashes, are real at the very moment we see them. We aren’t supposed to see that it is Zoë Bell, not Lucy Lawless, flying through a scene in a burning costume. Yet a deeper truth reveals itself in Bell’s joke.

Of course, Bell is Lawless’s stunt double, but Lawless is also her “acting double.” Without Bell’s immense physical presence in the action sequences of »Xena: Warrior Princess«, the final three seasons of the New Zealand cult series would not have been what they were. The same holds true for Quentin Tarantino’s »Kill Bill« (2003) and all the other films on which Bell has worked as a stunt double. Cinema and television, after all, are about more than just acting. The purely physical aspect of films and series exerts just as much fascination and impact, and in some genres, even more. In Zoë Bell’s career, these two sides — the openly visible and the one that remains unseen — have merged into one. Since her spectacular appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s »Death Proof« (2007), she has worked as an actress and stunt double, as well as a producer and stunt coordinator.

Of course, it was Quentin Tarantino who turned Bell, born in 1978 on New Zealand’s Waiheke Island, into a star. Yet it is the small B-movies and direct-to-video productions she has made since her breakthrough in »Death Proof« that breathe new life into the traditions of genre and exploitation cinema of past decades: cinema that Tarantino himself celebrated and referenced. Unlike »Django Unchained« (2012), »The Hateful Eight« (2015), and most recently »Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood« (2019), on which Bell also served as stunt coordinator, films such as Paul Etheredge’s »Angel of Death« (2009), Christopher Ray’s »Mercenaries« (2014), and the two action flicks directed by Josh C. Waller, »Raze« (2013) and »Camino« (2015), will not go down in cinema history.

In these genre works, usually made on low budgets and unconcerned with good taste or political correctness, the anarchic and subversive spirit that film, once a fairground spectacle, long exuded as a matter of course lives on. Major Hollywood studios, however, have largely driven this spirit out of cinema with their increasingly expensive blockbuster productions. Thus, Zoë Bell’s appearances in these films, and indeed the films themselves, always exude a sense of defiance, a rebellion against conventions driven solely by market forces. Bell is not merely the queen of kinetic cinema, lending an almost poetic dimension to her action sequences; she is also the queen of a wild, raw brand of filmmaking that now exists only in small niches.

Eve, the professional assassin Bell portrays in »Angel of Death«, could easily have been a cliché, much like the rebellious soldier Cassandra Clay in »Mercenaries« or Sabrina in »Raze«, who fights for her life time and again. At the very least, they are all classic genre archetypes familiar from countless action and horror movies. Yet Zoë Bell reveals new facets to these characters. In their own ways, Eve, Cassandra, and Sabrina are all angels of death. The worlds they inhabit force the role of the ruthless fighter upon them; it is the only way they can survive. But something else shines through in Bell’s performances: an irrepressible yearning for justice. It is not simply about survival. She is always fighting for a fairer world, both on screen and off.