Stuntwoman’s new life after horror accident
Stuntwoman Olivia Jackson’s life was shattered by a horrific accident. Five years later she’s finally received some compensation
LIFE use to be one big action adventure, travelling the world and performing feat after daredevil feat for some of the movie world’s biggest stars. But everything changed in a heartbeat five years ago when a stunt went catastrophically wrong – and Olivia Jackson has the scars and the loss of an arm to show for it.
What she doesn’t have – yet – is any compensation for her near-death experience.
She tried for years to get some kind of settlement, starting legal proceedings in South Africa, as well as in the USA, but due to jurisdiction laws the matter had to be dealt with in SA.
And now finally it seems she’ll have a measure of justice. A judge of the high court in Pretoria recently ruled Olivia (38) should be compensated by the Road Accident Fund (RAF) as the accident happened involving motor vehicles.
But for South African-born Olivia, the victory is bittersweet.
It can take years for lawyers and the RAF to agree on a settlement amount – and money will never bring back her old life. “I live in constant pain, not only physical but mental,” she says. “And the people who caused the accident are still living their lives as if nothing happened.”
Olivia has worked on 30 movies including Mad Max: Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, standing in for A-listers such as Charlize Theron, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Milla Jovovich.
But one day in 2015 on the N4 highway near Pretoria, everything changed in the blink of an eye.
A small adjustment to a stunt on the set of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter led to a crane being driven into Olivia while she was riding a motorbike. And the career she’d spent years building died on the road that day.
OLIVIA is speaking to YOU via video chat from her home in High Wycombe, northwest of London in England, and the scars on her neck and face are clearly visible, as is the stump of her left arm.
“I’ll have to deal with the injuries for the rest of my life,” she says.
“It’s hard – you just have to try to keep your head above water.”
After the accident, it took four months before she’d recovered enough to return home to England and years more to get her strength back. She’s able to practise martial arts and is even horse-riding now but it’s been a long, uphill battle.
It’s great to be able to do physical things again, Olivia says.
She was born and raised in KwaZulu-Natal and moved to Cape Town when she was 18 to pursue modelling, a career which took her to Europe.
Olivia has always had a passion for martial arts and decided to compete professionally, moving to Thailand to do so. There she was spotted by a movie producer looking for an actress who could perform stunts.
And that’s how she became a professional stuntwoman.
In 2013 she went to Britain to work on Guardians of the Galaxy and met her husband, David Grant, also a stuntman, on set. She’s been based in the UK ever since.
In September 2015 she returned to SA to film Resident Evil: The Final Chapter as the stunt double for the movie’s lead, Milla. “It was raining on the day of the accident. We were supposed to do a fight scene on top of a moving vehicle but I was asked to do the motorbike scene instead,” Olivia recalls.
This was the plan: she’d ride the bike on the empty highway and the camera vehicle would come from the opposite direc
tion, armed with a camera on a crane. At the last moment, the crane would raise the camera so she’d pass beneath it.
For Olivia, a motorbike enthusiast, there wasn’t anything particularly challenging about the riding. But there was one thing she couldn’t have foreseen.
“On all films it’s vital to clearly communicate all movements with the film crew involved. A small change can be catastrophic. We did a rehearsal run and it went well. But the camera vehicle driver and the crane operator decided to make changes without communicating them to me,” she says.
The camera vehicle changed its starting position and it was decided to lift the camera crane one second later, all done without communicating it to me or the rest of the crew, she says. “That one second had devastating consequences.”
For the shot, Olivia was riding the bike at 70km/h, while the camera vehicle travelled at 50km/h. But because of the recalculation, when the camera started lifting, it was too late.
Olivia, riding without a helmet, was hit at full speed in the head and upper body by the crane.
“I can’t remember anything of the accident,” she says.
She was taken to the Netcare Unitas Hospital in nearby Centurion, her life hanging by a thread. She had a brain bleed and her cheekbone had been shattered.
Five nerves in her neck as well as her a major artery in her arm were severed, she broke almost every bone in her arm, shoulder and left side of her upper body, she had an amputated thumb and a punctured lung.
Olivia was kept in a medically induced coma for 17 days. David was on a film set in Malta when he got the news and flew to SA to be with her.
“When I woke from the coma I immediately realised my life would never be the same. The left side of my body was paralysed,” she says.
The months following the accident were excruciating. “I had to learn to sit up on my own and to walk again which was a huge challenge. My spine was skew because of all the paralysis and dead weight on my left side. I lost more than 15kg.”
She and David finally returned to England in January 2016.
Nine months after the accident, Olivia’s lifeless left arm was amputated.
“I was immediately better. It was the best day since the accident. I could walk again and started to exercise.”
WHILE learning to cope with the physical challenges her once-strong body now faced, she also had to come to terms with the emotional implications of being financially dependent on her husband.
Months after the accident, she discovered the movie’s production company hadn’t insured the crew. “The RAF was the only place we would’ve been able to find compensation.”
She’s happy with the court’s finding that the driver and crane operator of the vehicle were “100% negligent”. The RAF indemnifies those negligent so it will be liable for compensation for her injuries, Olivia says. But the compensation amount – yet to be determined – won’t make up for her future loss of income.
At the time of the accident she was earning £3 000 (then about R63 000) a week. “The RAF payout [cap] is about R200 000 a year. It will never come close to what my loss of earnings will be.”
She’s having a tough time forgiving the production company and the crew.
“How can you put the crew’s lives in danger and not have liability insurance? The cameraman and the crane operator also walked away from the accident with no consequences.”
But she’s trying to stay positive and live in the now. “I’ve been a Buddhist for 20 years. It helps me to get a better perspective on life. I try to live in the present. I’ve learnt through the trauma to make peace with myself and the situation.”