Crashing through glass, choreographing chaos, and owning the screen—this is what feminine power looks like.
If you’re a fan of action movies, you’ve probably heard the name Jénel Stevens a lot over the past decade. The stuntwoman is responsible for portraying some of the most memorable edge-of-your-seat moments in countless productions, including the newly revamped Daredevil: Born Again, Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-nominated Black Panther, the wonderfully rousing Avengers: Endgame, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Joker, American Horror Stories, Fallout, The Equalizer, The Many Saints of Newark, and many more. She even provided motion capture for the popular video game Red Dead Redemption II and choreographed an entire team’s movement for Gina Prince-Bythewood’s enlightening historical drama The Woman King. Not only has the actress secured a position as the go-to performer for the perfect roundhouse kick, she’s also developed a reputation as an accomplished actress, accentuating both capabilities in full force with her latest project, Shadow Force.
“The marrying of stunts and acting, for me, is the mecca of where I want to be in my craft in this industry. That’s the biggest dream for me,” Stevens tells me about being cast in the movie—an honor that she was offered without even needing an audition. “I feel like I’m at the top of the mountain right now. It’s inspirational for myself just to continue to climb, and not knowing what’s on the other side of the mountain, not knowing if there’s a bigger mountain out there—which I know there is and just figuring out what that is is exciting, and I’m looking forward to it.”
In the film, an estranged couple–Kyrah Owens (Kerry Washington) and Isaac Sarr (Omar Sy)—with a bounty on their heads must go on the run with their son to avoid their former employer, a unit of shadow ops that has been sent to kill them. Stevens plays the ultra-cool Anino, one of the assassins hot on the duo’s trail.
In a unique display of gender reversal, Washington’s Kyrah is the fierce warrior hunting down the opposition, while her husband, Sy’s Omar, lies low on the lam with their son Ky (Jahleel Kamara). Like a lioness in the wild, the female protagonist in this story is the one protecting her pack. “It’s been happening for the past couple years now, which I’ve been truly enjoying seeing,” says Stevens about upgrading women’s roles in action movies from the damsel to the diehard. “I love that we’re in a space where we can do that, and that’s what’s moving the needle, and pushing the envelope, and opening people’s eyes to the fact that women are not just stay-at-home women anymore. We’re in the offices, we’re out in the fields. We know how to shoot. We know how to fight.”
Stevens would know a thing or two about being a modern-day self-sufficient woman. In a way, her path has always been leading right up to this very moment.
“I’ve been training for this job my whole life,” reflects Stevens. “I look back sometimes, and I just feel like, man, how did I get so lucky? But [my family] reminds me that the work I put in for this job has come since I was a kid.” Stevens’s parents enrolled her in a slew of highly physical sports at an early age, including baseball, karate, taekwondo, basketball, and tennis. Her father, an NYPD officer, taught her the value of caution while using firearms, thus instilling a mantra for “safety first” that she would carry with her throughout the rest of her career. “When somebody from the industry was getting me into stunts, they were like, ‘Put together a résumé and send it to me.’ I was like, ‘I don’t have a résumé for stunts.’ Another friend came along and said, ’Just write down everything you do for fun.’ So skydiving, horseback riding, my scuba certification—everything that I did really prepared me for where I am now.” Stevens had no idea that her recreational activities could one day blossom into a side hustle, let alone her main source of income. “I didn’t know it at the time,” she says, “I was just having fun. And then I just realized, hey, I can get paid for everything I do for fun. It has been crazy that my whole entire athletic and physical background has gotten me to where I am today.”
Despite stumbling into stunts in a rather leisurely fashion, Stevens inadvertently forged a rapid path to success in a relatively short amount of time. While working on Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s early-aughts Netflix original show The Get Down, she learned about an upcoming little Marvel production that was to be spearheaded by a young Sundance award-winning director named Ryan Coogler.
“I was in the shuttle van with a lot of other stunt performers that I know to this day,” she says. “I was new to the business at the time, and they kept talking about Black Panther. They kept talking about how the movie was coming, and it’s gonna be a big thing. At the time I said to myself, ‘Wow, that sounds great, but I’m so new to this, my time will come. I can’t wait to be on something that big at some point in my career.’ And lo and behold, shortly thereafter, I got a call to go in and audition for Black Panther. I didn’t know what it was at the time, because it was all hush-hush. But I got flown in to do an audition and the coordinators saw me, and they were like, ‘People like you exist in New York?’ Because at the time, there were so few Black female performers that knew martial arts. So that’s when it hit me, like, Oh wow, yeah, this is my wheelhouse. This is what I’ve been meaning to do.”
Car flips, shoot-outs, parkour, and boat jumps: just girly things. At least, Stevens is hoping to implement the idea that such action-oriented lifestyles are not merely reserved for those who identify as masculine. According to the starlet, there are more women in her field than when she was first starting out, but the numbers still fall short of the desired amount.
“I came in at a great time when Black superheroes were coming up on the acting side, so they needed people to double them, like in Iron Fist and Luke Cage, but we definitely need more on that roster,” insists Stevens. “I would absolutely encourage people to do this. It’s very rewarding, it’s very fun. That’s kind of what I take pride in, actually, is speaking to schools, and speaking on panels, and speaking to groups of people, especially young Black females, so they can know that this is something that exists.” An advocate as much as she is an entrepreneur, Stevens finds that the greatest reward of all is the many lives she’s touched along her journey. “I’ve actually had people reach out to me on social media saying, ‘I never thought this was possible. Thank you for sharing your story,’ so I really enjoy that part of it.”
Diving headfirst into a body of water 90 feet below in freezing cold temperatures makes a master of her craft like Stevens look fearless. She assures me that’s not the case.
“I absolutely feel fear,” she reveals. “If I don’t feel fear, that’s when I know I need to stop doing this job. My whole motivation in stunts is to overcome fear. It’s a mental game for me, mostly.” That mindset might have even kept her alive on one particular occasion, when she was faced with an unexpected twist in her filming schedule. “I was hired for a job in Budapest, and they flew me over. I knew that I had to fly through glass and jump through a window. Then we were there in the rehearsal space, and the coordinator was like, ‘All right, so after you jump in this window, you’re gonna get hit by the car,’ and my face just dropped. He goes, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you that part.’ And I’m already in Budapest. Funny enough, car hits were something I originally thought I wouldn’t do in my career, because they are very dangerous. But being able to look back and say, ‘I did that’ is a proud moment for me. Everybody thinks we’re daredevils, but we’re not. We take calculated risks and make sure that everybody can walk home.”
But even the best-performed stunts are wasted on the wrong filmmaker. Luckily, if there’s one person who knows how to properly capture an action scene, it’s Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan.
“He’s so full of energy, so full of life,” Stevens tells me about her first time working with the filmmaker. “He’s so inspiring. My first day on set, he came over to us and he was like, ‘Listen guys, just have fun. Do what you do. If anything’s going wrong, that’s my fault. You guys are perfect. You’re all here for a reason.’ He was so positive when he would give feedback, and he would play music between takes, and just keep the energy up in the room. It just made everything run seamlessly, and it really brought us all together as a cast.”
Basking in being a part of the main cast meant getting to skip coordinating in-depth choreography this time around, an experience that Stevens admits was both a relief and oddly unfamiliar. “It was kind of a little weird, not going to lie, going to rehearsals for stunts and only going in there for the hour or two that we, the actors, come in for,” she admits. “I was like, Oh, okay, I guess I’m not going to be here all day like I’m used to.” Unbeknownst to her until she arrived on set, she already had a fan on the crew. “It was really cool; one of the stunt doubles who was tasked to train with me came up to me and was like, ‘Oh, actually, can you show me this, and can you show me that?’ He had so much respect for me and my martial arts background, and he wanted to learn from me.”
Being a part of the main cast comes with many rewards. For Stevens, acting alongside Kerry Washington tops them all. “She’s OG,” states Stevens about her co-star. “She’s an amazing person too, inside and out. Beautiful, beautiful person. She wasn’t just going back to her trailer or going back to her room. She really hung out with us and made us all feel like equals, and the energy and the expertise she brought on set also just made everything else fall into place. When you have somebody like that, everybody’s level just goes up to meet her.” She continues, “One of the first things we did as a cast is we went out, and she took us to a place where you can learn how to cook. We all sat down, and we’re like, ‘Where’s Kerry?’ She was in the kitchen, and she served us the drinks and the food. When we would come back from set, she was like a fish. She loved being in the water. So we would all hang out in the pool. And it just didn’t seem like a pecking order. It just seemed like everybody was equal. She unconsciously brought everybody up.”
Shadow Force, a movie about a militant, multilayered, complex female character fighting to live the life she desires, and not the one that’s been assigned to her, feels familiar for Stevens. It’s not her first official acting role, but it’s the most screen time her actual dazzling face has earned yet. It also signifies a shift. For the stunt performer turned actress, if there’s some insight to be gained from the experience, it’s that she’s more than earned a place next to her colleagues.
“I’m supposed to be in the room,” Stevens practically sings with bravado. “That, to me, is the biggest thing. Like I said before, when I was doing stunts, I would feel like I just got lucky. Now, going through the same track with acting, I’m starting to realize, no, I did put in the work. I deserve to be here, and I’ll continue to work my butt off. But nobody says I can’t do this too. That’s the biggest thing I take away, and that I’m celebrating and just not doubting myself and continuing to lead with a positive mindset of, ‘I deserve to be here.’ I’m doing this, and I can do this, and I can be great at this.”
All Images Courtesy Of Talent
