The success of action movies like Wonder Woman and television shows like WandaVision show that viewers like seeing women fighting, flying and jumping. Stunt performers often take the place of famous male and female actors in these action films so the big stars do not get hurt. At one point, movie producers would commonly use stuntmen wearing hairpieces, or wigs, to perform these actions for female actors.

The practice began to change in 2017 when an American stuntwoman, Deven MacNair, started a discrimination complaint. She said a producer had used a stuntman to perform a stunt for a female actor on a set she was working on.

Lucas Dollfus is the director of Campus Univers Cascade, or CUC, in northeastern France. He said, “We don’t need wigs anymore. The women are badass in any case.” CUC calls itself the world’s biggest stunt school. About a third of the students at the school are women like Valeriane Michelini. Once trained as a dancer, Michelini is now training to fight, crash through glass windows and jump out of helicopters at CUC. She said fighting has a different kind of movement than dancing. “I’m used to thriving in a graceful and feminine world,” the 29-year-old said. “And now, I’m in quite the opposite.”

April Wright makes films that tell stories about real life, called documentaries. Her film Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story came out in 2020. She spent many hours talking with women who do stunts in Hollywood, including those who started in the 1960s and 1970s. “Generally, women are holding their own, and getting most of these opportunities,” Wright said.

Wright said stuntwomen do not usually go to a stunt school. They often find work by learning from or meeting people in the industry. Some make videos on YouTube or TikTok to show their skills. “Sometimes stunts run in families,” Wright said. “Not every stuntwoman had that, but a lot of them had fathers that helped them develop the skills.”

Wright said stunt people are very careful in the way they prepare for their work because they know it is dangerous. Sometimes it may be just a broken bone. But in 2017, stuntwoman Joi Harris, who had been a professional motorcycle racer, died in a chase during the filming of Deadpool 2.