When she hears the word action, Annabel Wood’s job is to take the command literally. She very often makes her living dying. All in all, Wood has died more times than she can count – and she keeps coming back from more. She’s a stunt performer, and one of the best in the business. She leaps off cliffs and castle walls, dodges speeding cars and motorcycles, and, dons prosthetics to become an ice zombie and charge into a camp prepared to do her worst. A few takes later, in a completely different role, Wood is now the victim of several ice zombies (children, no less) in one of the most ambitious episodes of TV ever.
Once, when doubling Milla Jovovich in 2015’s Survivor, Wood had to literally run into the side of a speeding police car and hit it just right to launch herself into the air in a spinning arc before hitting the ground. A millisecond early or late and the results could have been, well, deadly.In the past three years alone, Wood’s filmography reads like a list of Hollywood’s biggest hits. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) are just a few of the megahits she has worked on, and she’s hardly slowing down. In 2017 she’s already got three major films under her belt—Patty Jenkins’ sensational Wonder Woman, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy (2017). Since she first began performing stunts in 2012 (on Sam Mendes’ excellent Bond flick Skyfall (2012), no less), Wood has honed her craft and elevated her game.
Yet, for all of her big screen success, it’s her work on the small screen that might elicit the most interest these days. For the past three years, Wood has been doing some major stunts for the television series, Game of Thrones. When we caught up with her, she was in the midst of working on the series’ upcoming seventh season, the plot details of which are as tightly held as a state secret (or perhaps more tightly held), but which has been confirmed to include some of the most ambitious stunts in television history. Wood was still happy to share her thoughts on working on GOT, these mega blockbuster films, and enthuse over her experience working on Wonder Woman, which gave her the rare opportunity to work alongside a predominately female group of stunt performers.
By Bryan Abrams
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