There are few people who can lay claim to having an instantly iconic film debut. Some wait years for one line or scene that enshrines them in the annals of cinema, but for Eunice Huthart, making an impact was on the agenda from day one. Cast as Famke Janssen’s stunt double in 1995’s GoldenEye, Huthart didn’t deliver a piece of dialogue as much as she flexed muscle to make it into Bond Girl history. That famous thigh squeeze Xenia Onatopp uses to dispatch her foes? “Yeah, that’s me,” laughs Huthart.
With the crush of a leg, Huthart was a household name. Her easy path to Xenia isn’t unusual if we consider the early careers of other combat-sports performers like Dave Bautista, John Cena, and The Rock. (The latter appeared in The Mummy Returns two years after his first TV appearance on That ’70s Show.) She, a Liverpudlian kickboxer, was just trying it a full decade earlier, and as a woman, too, which made her quick ascent rather spectacular at the time.
In the mid-1990s, Huthart appeared on the competition show Gladiators, wherein athletes of all stripes play against an in-house Gladiator in physical games. Huthart not only won her edition, she ended up becoming a Gladiator herself, and it didn’t take long before the U.K. stunt industry was knocking on her door.
“The British stuntwomen at the time — there wasn’t much to choose from,” the now 58-year-old explains. “The girls were very good, but there just weren’t many girls with combat experience. They couldn’t find a stunt double for Famke Janssen in GoldenEye with the martial-arts ability needed. I was seen on the show, and I got asked to come for an audition down at Warner Bros. Studios. And then it went from there. I was three days into rehearsing and I was like, This is what I was made to do.”
She quickly earned credits in some of the biggest films of the ’90s and early 2000s — The Fifth Element (1997), Titanic (1997), The Beach (2000) — along with loads of television appearances. She credits stunt coordinator Simon Crane, her boss on GoldenEye, for continuing to bring her aboard projects, along with stunt legend Vic Armstrong. “I felt like I was in stunt royalty all the time when I was around those guys,” she recalls.
It was Crane, though, who steered Huthart into her most fruitful collaboration of the era. First in 2001’s Tomb Raider, then in 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith and 2010’s Salt, Huthart became Angelina Jolie’s regular stunt double. With Jolie, Huthart began to understand how to build character in her stuntwork. “What I learned about working with actresses — particularly Angelina, but Catherine Zeta-Jones was the same, Uma Thurman was the same — they never wanted to leave the character behind when they were doing stunts. They always wanted the character to be carried through the action.” Even when she made the traditional career jump from stunt double and performer to stunt coordinator and second unit director, she says she took this mentality with her. “I should be honoring exactly what that actress wants to deliver, not how I think it should be portrayed but exactly how she wants it portrayed,” she says. “I always want to feel like it’s the character doing it all the time.”
The admiration is mutual. “Eunice is the reason I was able to have a career in action,” Jolie says. “She not only trained and doubled me, but she was the person who helped me understand the art form of stunts and storytelling with action. On- and off-screen, if I was ever in a dangerous situation, I would pray for her at my side. She’s full of fire, but those who know her well know she is equally full of empathy and warmth. She’s a brilliant stunt coordinator because she understands character and story. She’s there for the team, not her ego.”
Huthart wasn’t the first woman to make the jump to stunt coordinator, but it was still something of a rarity within the stunt world when she did it. Her coordinating credits are staggering, taking command of massive films like Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “I was a tomboy as a kid, and then I was into martial arts and I was the only girl in the gym,” she says. “Sometimes I think if you look for the barrier, you’d already become a victim because of that circumstance. I just would never let it hold me back. I would be the loudest voice in the room all the time. I would be the one that would stand up and argue.”
Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have regrets. “I’ll be honest, I’ve done films where we sold our soul,” she adds. “But when we did Pan, me and the stunt team, we gave everything. Levi Miller, who played Pan, and Hugh Jackman worked so hard, rehearsed with us eternally on weekends, before call, after call. And I just felt like that film should have been good for how much blood, sweat, and tears went into it. I was ever so disappointed that the film wasn’t the great film we always wanted it to be. The biggest reward to me is actually to create something that people really like and love to talk about.”
Perhaps Huthart, eternally humble, wouldn’t see it this way, but her body of work overall is something that people really like and love to talk about. One such person is director Nida Manzoor, whose 2023 action-comedy Polite Society positioned Huthart as the zenith of stuntwork. In the film, Young Ria (Priya Kansara) is a burgeoning martial artist who looks to none other than Eunice Huthart as inspiration. As Ria makes action films to her parents’ chagrin, Huthart hangs over her life just out of reach, a mentor Ria craves.
Manzoor didn’t pick Huthart out of a hat for this; she grew up viewing her through the same lens her character Ria did. “Seeing her go from contestant to Gladiator and then sort of later on in my career, knowing her as a stuntwoman and then seeing her work as a stunt coordinator — she is essentially a force of nature,” Manzoor says. Still, Huthart couldn’t quite process that an entire film was being made essentially in her honor. “We reached out to her to try and get her to agree to be involved with the film, but she was so busy. I don’t think it quite landed that she was at the heart of the film and essentially the main character’s hero,” Manzoor explains. “It wasn’t until she came in to do her bit of voice-over that she was like, ‘What is going on?’ She doesn’t believe that anyone would admire her, but just being in her presence for a couple minutes, you’re like, This woman is a total badass.”
“It still trips me out!” says Huthart of the experience. “Honestly, it’s mental to me. I’m still flabbergasted at the whole thing. I’m like, ‘Why would you do it about me?’”
Huthart is more likely to turn our conversation to the collaborators who mentored her. J.J. Abrams comes up many times as a “genius” with whom she can work effortlessly. Guy Ritchie is another. “When we did King Arthur, it was really funny because Guy would just go, ‘Nah, nah, nah, come on, Eunice, let’s get a bit of Liverpool in there. Come on!’” And then there’s Joe Wright, her director on Pan. “The fascinating thing about Joe Wright is his camera is a character, so we’ve always got to find the camera concept as well,” she explains. “His camera has to deliver some form of emotion, and that, again, was amazing.”
Because, of course, the job of stunt professionals is not just to throw bodies and beat down — they must understand how to expertly block, frame, and shoot any given scenario. This is why many stunt professionals make the leap from performing to coordinating and directing. “I love developing a fight,” Huthart says. “The first version of a fight could be reincarnated possibly a hundred times. We’d come up with something and then we would tear it apart, and then we’d end up with a version that we love, which could take three weeks sometimes to get. Then we’ll teach the actors, then we’ll apply it in the environment, and then we’ll teach the actors in the environment, and then we’ll shoot it. I love it.”
With over three decades in the business, she’s still going a mile a minute; she most recently worked on True Detective: Night Country and the 2025 animated Sonic spinoff Knuckles, and she’s got a top-secret collaboration with Abrams on her plate. (Looking forward for a second, she realizes she hasn’t done a western yet and adds that genre to her bucket list. “I love anything that is confrontational and a challenge. A ‘one of us is going to die, and it’s not going to be me’ type of scenario.”) But she falls instantly back into memories, particularly of shooting Danny Boyle’s The Beach, and the thrill she gets from simply being on a set.
“There was a waterfall, I think it was about 80 feet high. But what happened was, 30 feet out, there was only two feet of water. You had to make sure you pitched out far enough that when you landed, you landed past the two feet of water. And that’s one of the few things I’ve done where if I got it wrong, I would’ve either been dead or very, very severely hurt. The adrenaline and the pump I got off that was magic. And when I watched the way Danny Boyle shot it and went into slo-mo …” she trails off. “That’s what it felt like when I did it.”
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