Angelina Jolie’s become mighty well known for doing as many of her own stunts as possible in her movies, and the same holds true with her latest release, Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead.
Jolie plays Hannah in the film, a smokejumper working in the Montana wilderness who’s coping with the loss of three boys she couldn’t save from a fire. Now she’s working solo in a fire tower where she expects to have no contact with anyone at all - until Finn Little’s character Connor shows up. He’s all alone and on the run from two especially ruthless killers. So now, not only must Hannah help Connor outrun them, but they also need to evade the massive forest fire coming their way.
Needless to say, this is a role that came with a good deal of stuntwork, stunts like jumping off a 60-foot tall fire tower. With Those Who Wish Me Dead now available to watch on HBO Max, I got the opportunity to chat with Jolie about the film and opted to look back on when she first recognized the value of doing her own stuntwork. While it wasn’t a surprise to hear Jolie credit that realization to the 2001 Tomb Raider movie, it was a surprise to hear that, initially, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to do the movie at all. Here’s how she put it:
“I said, ‘I really didn’t feel like that character suited me.’ I actually didn’t at first want to do it; I said no. But they said you can travel the world and train with the British Military and so I had three months of seeing what I could do. And I would encourage anybody to do that. Sign up for as much as you can, give yourself a few months, push yourself to the limit and see, ‘What can I do?’ And you find that there’s a lot you didn’t know and some crazy, weird things you can do or you’re capable of, so I love it.”
Jolie also took a moment to highlight the importance of finding the right balance between stunts and visual effects to ensure maximum authenticity on screen:
“And I do think the more we have in film that’s visual effects, the more it’s important to do your own stunts if you can because I think the audience knows the difference and it feels real when it is.”
If you’re looking to hear more from Jolie and also her co-star Finn Little on what it was like doing their stuntwork in Those Who Wish Me Dead, you can catch our full chat with the pair in the video at the top of this article!