Stunted love
Dangerous liaison for Kiwis on Mad Max set
THEY MET in the Namibian desert, their love blossoming in the usual ways. A shared look, a touch, spending hours blindfolded while taking apart firearms, hanging off speeding vehicles, punching each other in the face.
OK, maybe not usual by most people’s standards, but for a couple of stunt professionals it’s run of the mill.
You wouldn’t recognise them on the street and you may not know their names, but they’ve played pivotal roles on films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Death Race; Underworld and King Kong.
Dane and Dayna Grant are the ultimate power couple.
They spend their days being set on fire, riding horses, stunt driving, fighting, weapons training and all but leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
So it makes perfect sense that they met on the set of one of this year’s biggest action films – Mad
Max: Fury Road.
‘‘I saw Dayna straight away – she was the only girl from New Zealand and she stood out like a sore thumb,’’ says Dane.
‘‘I saw her bag with her name on it and my opening line was literally, ‘Hi. I see you’re Dayna. I’m Dane’. That was about it.’’
Dayna’s been in the stunt business for some 20 years, starting off where most of New Zealand’s thriving stunt industry did; on Xena and Hercules.
The 39-year-old’s reputation and previous experience doubling for Charlize Theron earned her the call-up to
Mad Max, and she was immediately shipped off to Namibia to begin a vigorous six-week training boot-camp.
‘‘You need to have a lot of strength for holding on to the side of trucks and under trucks. Everything was on the move. Instead of cutting you’d just reset and carry on and you’d still be underneath the truck, still holding on. You go until you can’t go anymore,’’ Dayna says.
‘‘ Mad Max is definitely, hands down, the most . . . you’re just happy to be alive, I guess. The stuff that we did, I’ve never done anything like.’’
Dayna also spent hours every day learning fight choreography and training with weapons. That’s where Dane came in. Before fellow Kiwi Jacob Tomuri was cast as Tom Hardy’s double, Dane was hired to fill in as his rehearsal double for scenes with Dayna. ‘‘So the two of us were doing this – dare I say – very S&M-type fight, it’s a love/hate mixture between these characters. They’re very close, there’s chains, they’re holding each other in very intimate positions, and the longer we were doing it the more we’re kind of eyeing each other up,’’ Dane laughs, a little abashed.
‘‘We’ve said it before and it’s quite cheesy, but it really was love at first sight. While we were punching each other we were falling for each other – quite rapidly.’’
IT’S AN unlikely meeting ground, and Dane calls it fate, saying ‘‘stars aligned’’.
It was no mistake Dayna was on set – her path to stunt fame seeming equally as fated.
‘‘I fell into it. I was training in the gym, did gymnastics, horse riding, dance, but I had some friends that were into it that invited me to an audition, so I went along to do this daredevil thing and I ended up with a yearlong contract,’’ she says.
She signed onto Cleopatra 2525 and Xena: Warrior Princess, and from there went on to work in lead stunt roles on Spartacus, Power Rangers, Narnia, Snow White and the Huntsman and more, heading for Fury Road.
On the other hand, at 38, Dane is still somewhat new to the game, having spent a lifetime travelling before an unusual interest led him to stunting.
He’s been a dive instructor in Egypt’s Red Sea, lived in Ghana, Jordan and the UK, where he eventually found parkour – otherwise known as street running.
‘‘I was completely amazed by what I saw. I had a gymnastics background and this was kind of outdoor gymnastics but better – there were no rules, no-one holding up a sign saying ‘you can do better’,’’ he says.
His penchant for parkour saw him travel the world doing shows, coaching, and signing on to do commercials until he eventually nabbed his first stunt job.
‘‘Once you do that first [job], you get into somebody’s database, they pass your name on and that leads to another job and another job and then you can start calling yourself a stunt performer.’’
His path to Fury Road wasn’t as straightforward as Dayna’s, though.
He battled through a vigorous audition process in his homeland, South Africa, surviving boot camp and getting the golden ticket, at which point it was pure luck he was chosen to fill in opposite his now wife.
Fast forward three years though, and Dane is now living in New Zealand helping Dayna run the NZ Stunt School she founded in 2010, and raising their 1-year-old son Ryder.
With Dayna working as stunt coordinator on the forthcoming Kiwi film Ash vs
Evil Dead, it’s Dane’s turn to be off while Dayna’s on.
That’s how it works in a relationship where both people stunt. ‘‘It helps to have somebody who understands what you’re going through, especially the long hours,’’ Dane says.
‘‘It’s nice to have one person on and the other can relax and look after little one – we can almost dictate when we want to take a job or have a break.’’
IF THE success of Mad Max: Fury Road is anything to go by, the pair won’t have much time to relax.
Critics and fans are already raving about the non-stop action of George Miller’s latest addition to his now infamous franchise, which has been more than a decade and a reported $150 million in the making.
And as it goes in the stunt world; the bigger the success, the more jobs that result, and the more the industry will turn to New Zealand for their stunt performers. Productions like Xena and
Hercules put New Zealand on the film-industry map, as Dayna says they acted as an ongoing training ground. ‘‘We needed to be able to do anything, and we did those shows for so many years for five or six days a week, all year round, for years,’’ she says.
‘‘And they weren’t little gags, we were doing big stunts every day. Those shows have trained up a whole team of really talented performers.’’
Allan Poppleton, a Kiwi stunt coordinator, started in the trade at the same time as Dayna, working on Xena and later on films like The
Wolverine, The Expendables 2 and The Hunger Games.
He’s on set in Boston in the US, working on the upcoming Central
Intelligence with Dwayne ‘‘The Rock’’ Johnson and comedian Kevin Hart, but he makes time to take a call – especially if it gives the Kiwi stunt industry a chance to shine. He’s worked with both Dane and Dayna and says they are talented performers, and two of many – that’s why the industry comes here. ‘‘It’s that thing with Kiwis – how easygoing the are. They’re hard workers, get stuck into it and do what needs to be done without making a big song and dance about it,’’ he says.
In the US, stunt performers split jobs into specialities, he says; so one will drive, one will fight, one will ride and so on – a luxury we don’t have in New Zealand. We don’t have the workflow, they have to be a jack of all trades. That good ol’ Kiwi attitude is hard to beat.’’
He says there’s a handful of Kiwis who have done especially well in work outside of New Zealand, like Dayna, but also including Ben Cook, who doubled for James Bond in the last two films, and Zoe Bell, who’s been in
Kill Bill and Iron Man and had a lead role in Raze.
‘‘The Kiwis are doing really well and they don’t get a lot of recognition. It’s tall poppy syndrome and you’ll find it with most Kiwis; they don’t really talk themselves up, so it’s kind of cool for everyone to hear more about it,’’ says Poppleton.
Dane and Dayna both say the success of Fury Road has taken them all by surprise.
‘‘We weren’t sure if it was going to be that big. You just never know what it’s going to be like but you hope that every film you do is going to be epic,’’ says Dayna.
‘‘Between our budding relationship, keeping it professional when everything’s rolling, dealing with this intense shoot in the Namibian desert, going from boiling hot to freezing cold, sand storms, fatigue – it was crazy,’’ Dane says. ‘‘But I cannot say it enough; the work that Dayna does – that everyone does on this – absolutely shines through in bucket loads. I’m so proud.’’
While we were punching each other we were falling for each other – quite rapidly.
Dane Grant