This is the third in a series of articles and portraits of elite female mountain athletes — part of WyoFile’s America 250: State of Equality project, which you can read here.
Amanda MacLeod has fallen across silver screens throughout the country while working as a Hollywood stunt double, using skills she learned from skiing and dancing while growing up in Wyoming.
Before she could walk, her father carried her in a backpack while he skied in the Teton backcountry. She was in dance classes by age 4, learning skills that would lay the foundation for a career on stage and in front of the lens.
Through school years, her athleticism grew as she played soccer, cycled, climbed, hiked, danced and paddled, much of it among Wyoming’s hills. Her grandmother was a ballroom dancer, her mother a dancer with the local troupe, her father an avid skier.
“I was dancing and skiing side-by-side my whole life,” MacLeod said. But when she saw a performance by the Diavolo: Architecture in Motion dance company, it swayed her to focus her talents and provoked a fateful conversation.
“Sorry, Dad. I’m going to join the Dancers’ Workshop Junior Company.”
That decision sent MacLeod down a coast-to-coast path — dancing in New York, moving to L.A., working odd jobs and finally, landing on a film set. Among other roles, she was the stunt double for Doug Jones in “Hocus Pocus 2.”
“Which is crazy because he’s a 6’-4” guy, and I’m a 5’-4” woman,” she said. Jones played zombie Billy Butcherson, she his headless double.
“A lot of it is just Doug Jones’s talking head, and then me stumbling around the world,” she said. Her skiing and dancing skills gave her a foundation for soundstage antics.
“If you don’t know how to bail and fall on skis or a bike, if you don’t know how to roll out of that, you’re really going to be in a world of hurt,” she said of learning her art. “Being a dancer has allowed me as a stunt performer to jump into most anything. You know where every part of your body is at all times … something that I haven’t found in any other athletic endeavor. That’s what helps me stumble without hurting myself.”
MacLeod said she knows when she’s hit the mark.
“A stunt person’s favorite thing is when the crew or the director goes, ‘Oh my God, are you okay?’”
Kept up with the boys
“Without my dance background, I would not be where I am in my career,” she said, “and without my extreme sports background, I also would not be where I am in my career.”
Now 37, she forged her ethos in the sometimes cruel crucible of high school and “a patriarchal environment of extreme sports.”
“If you were kind of popular, it was because you could hang and keep up with the boys, or because they wanted to sleep with you,” she said of her formative years. “I was the one who kept up with the boys.”
Dancers provided more inspiration than cliff-jumping dudes. “I saw a couple of big companies from New York and London around my freshman year, and it just put me completely on fire for dance.”
She earned a BFA in dance and choreography from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey and became a performance artist in Brooklyn.
“I was doing artsy-fartsy stuff in basements and galleries and what have you, while also working for a nonprofit and a restaurant. I was hitting the ground hard in my 20s. I got kind of burnt out, having to work so hard just to survive.”
“I was the one who kept up with the boys.”
Amanda MacLeod
She packed two suitcases and moved to Los Angeles, for a Pilates apprenticeship in Laguna Beach, a discipline that cured a back injury. On a whim, she took a job with a tech startup.
“After six months, I kind of came to,” she said of her corporate stint. “It wasn’t for naught,” she said of the alien culture, because it gave her key communication and networking skills.
In L.A. she made good on a promise she’d made to herself in high school: dancing with Diavolo, the company that had inspired 17-year-old MacLeod to focus on dance back in Jackson.
“The amount of athleticism that that company requires and the strength that it requires — we’re literally running, sprinting, jumping, leaping, and flying 25, 30, feet through the air … caught by a few guys — helped [me] get over this really gnarly disorder,” she said. “And it also inspired me to go, ‘I’m going to join that company someday.’ And 10 years later, I did.”
The experience, and the daily discipline required to keep up, cured her of a troubled eating behavior, she said.
Old white dude with an eye patch
As she became more established, MacLeod began working with art departments on film sets and learning about stunt work.
“It’s like adult playtime,” she said of her work on the movie sets. Then someone said “Oh, you should go to this open call.”
It was a dance tryout that drew 300 dancers, actors and stunt workers, everyone from college cheerleaders to martial artists, gymnasts and parkour athletes.
“And there’s this man, this old, like older white dude, sitting in a chair, bald with an eye patch, and I’m just like, OK, who are you and what’s happening? This is great.
“He’s giving everyone one minute to do a pass. He’ll put two people in front of the whole group and say, ‘Okay, go,’ and you just have one minute to show off some shit, and that’s it.”
MacLeod jumped, dove, and bounced off walls. “And he just went ‘perfect’” she said. “I went ‘OK,’ [and] just walked away because people blow smoke up your ass a lot in this town.”
But she was “perfect” and got a callback, then another. Before long she found herself in front of cameras, working on pre-production for “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
Hollywood has its problems. “There’s still a lot of tropes about women sleeping around for work,” she said. She sometimes wonders, “am I getting hired because this guy’s going to hit on me and try to get me to sleep with him, or is he hiring me because of my skills?”
“I went ‘okay,’ [and] just walked away because people blow smoke up your ass a lot in this town.”
Amanda MacLeod
Things are changing and new Screen Actors Guild rules that women should double for women and other guidelines are boosting opportunities. Yet, “it’s still very much a man’s game,” she said. “They have way more jobs.”
Her niche is as a double. “If you can double an actress and become tight with them, you can get carried with them for their career.”
MacLeod sees potential for filming in Wyoming. “Think about outside of Lander, or near the Wind Rivers. There’s so much environment that could be used there. There are plenty of talented cinematographers in Wyoming. There’s a bunch of people that know how to rig that just need the right training.
“We have people who could do it, but they don’t because it’s really expensive to live in Jackson, and there’s no film incentives in Wyoming.”
It would be nice to work in her home state, MacLeod said, in part because “I’m kind of over cities.”
“I’m so grateful for everything I’ve been able to accomplish and do. But none of it matters if I don’t have trees and mountains and rivers to go home to.”
