Desert Sage column

The harness fit snugly around my waist and shoulders, and I had taken a few trust falls backward onto the stunt mat behind me. The sun was setting and soon we would lose daylight. I signaled that I was ready.

We were filming a scene in which my character gets hit by a van. Happily, this did not require me actually to be clobbered. Instead, we filmed me being knocked backward and spliced that into footage of the van through the awe-inspiring art of editing.

We shot five takes. On “Action!” there would be a pause for my reaction before I was yanked backward into the air, limbs out and careful of my neck, landing squarely on the mat each time. Crew members checked in with me as we repeated the stunt, until the director said, “That’s enough, we got it or we didn’t.”

It was a low-budget horror flick and I had no stunt double. The producers were conscientious. They respected how demanding the work was and took care of their performers.

This is not always the case, even in high-budget, high-profile productions; and sadly, many actors go along when filmmakers or theater directors blur the line between make-believe and real trauma.

An interview with actor Hannah Waddington this week grabbed attention for her grisly account of being waterboarded for a scene in the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”

By her account, the script was changed at the last minute, and with little warning she was fitted for a wetsuit and subjected to 10 hours of repeatedly having liquid poured onto her face, into her eyes and nose and airways, in what she called “the worst day of my life.”

Sadly, here was how she described learning what her employers had planned for her: “… in those moments you have to think, do you serve the piece and get on with it or do you chicken out and go, ‘No, this isn’t what I signed up for, blah, blah, blah?’”

O vile submission! The choice is never between “serving the piece” or “chickening out.”

If they can animate a dragon...

Film and theater deal in make-believe. We are pretending. Certainly, we may take risks and explore unknown depths of ourselves; but telling a compelling story never requires abdicating self-care or submitting to abuse.

“Game of Thrones” featured dragons that fly and breathe fire. If your production team can merge you into footage with an animated dragon, they can storyboard a sequence that does not require you to be tortured for 10 hours — and they have an obligation to do so.

An actor may freely choose to try something risky for a scene, but Waddington’s account left me unconvinced she enjoyed that autonomy.

When discussing this with Dan Granke, a theatrical director and fight choreographer with whom I once worked, I came down hard on showrunners and directors while Granke spoke about the internal pressure that limits actors’ personal autonomy, across the industry.

“There’s a whole constellation of pressures on an actor to say yes to a situation, and in her situation it’s so clear that some of those pressures … prevented her from saying no to something that was dangerous and inappropriate,” Granke said, adding: “There’s definitely excessive pressure on women to perform in these situations when they shouldn’t have to.”

An accident I witnessed at a professional theater in Boston demonstrated that pressure. We were rehearsing a scene involving bicycles on a raked platform. One of the actors slipped, fell from the stage and broke her pelvis.

As she lay on the floor below in agony, she expressed anger at herself for being injured, repeatedly saying, “I’m sorry,” and crying: “They’re never gonna hire me again.”

In fact, the show was reimagined and that actor remained in her role, performing in a wheelchair.

Consensual risk vs. outside pressure

Pretend can be demanding, and actors accept risk. A carefully choreographed, well-rehearsed fight can go wrong — I have a scar from a sword to prove it. Dramatic scenes can leave you exhausted and naked, but the idea that actors need to be miserable or forget who they are, literally “become” the character or expose one another to actual pathology or trauma does not demonstrate a devotion to craft, but rather an absence of it.

Maybe this is easier for me to say, having left the profession: Directors who do not know how to stage violence or emotionally grueling scenes without endangering or harming performers do not know their craft and need to sit down.

Entertainment reporters have contributed to the problem, Granke reminded me: “The media glorifies these actors who do outrageous things in the name of so-called craft. …It’s not the kind of thing we should be glorifying in terms of creating a piece of art — how much people were hurt or how weird people got. That doesn’t make the art inherently better, so why are we doing these things?”

Perhaps more interviewers should ask actors: Did you have the power to say no to this, and if not, why not? They might also — as journalists — hold directors and producers to account for personal and physical safety in these workplaces.

Algernon D'Ammassa was an actor for stage and film before entering journalism. He can be reached via adammassa@lcsun-news.com or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.

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