Pam Grier still has injuries from “Foxy Brown” 50 years later: 'I didn't have a stunt double'
"I didn't think I'd walk away, and I'd be covered with dust," the actress said of some early screen projects.
Pam Grier paved the way for modern female action stars with the 1974 Blaxploitation film Foxy Brown — and five decades later, she still feels injuries she sustained while performing her own stunts.
Speaking to Live with Kelly and Mark on Friday, Grier, 74, discussed some of the challenges she endured in the early '70s. "It took four years to prepare men, a patriarchal society, to see a woman do martial arts, jump around, do stunts," she said. "They weren't prepared for it, and they found it offensive, and they oppressed a lot of our womanhood. So when I came out, and I wanted to show, 'This is what I learned on the Air Force bases, kung fu, qigong — internal martial arts, external.'… It's a different form, and I had to show that without a sport bra."
She added, "I didn't have a stunt double, so I had to look and appear convincing. I got hurt."
Grier went on to explain how she wants the forthcoming biography series based on her memoir to depict the obstacles she faced when she was getting a foothold in Hollywood. "I hope when we do the production of my life as a series, I will show the first four movies with Roger Corman and how I did the stunts and I got injured," she said, referring to the Corman-produced projects The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, The Twilight People, and The Big Bird Cage. "I didn't think I'd walk away, and I'd be covered with dust, and every episode was like, 'I can't do this anymore until I get a stunt double,' to show what it took to prepare our audience to accept a woman in a 'masculine' role."
The actress said she felt compelled to persist in the action genre so that female performers would be treated better in future projects. "I didn't start it, it wasn't me, but I knew I had to do it, and I feel it. I have injuries," she said. "But to see it, Charlize Theron, and you see all the other actresses just doing martial arts, they call them franchises, you know, and be so good at it and have the stuntwoman teach you how to make them look good, and they give us an industry. They make us look good. They make us look like a heroine."
Last year, Grier reflected on her storied career in an interview with Entertainment Weekly and touched on Foxy Brown. "Foxy was strategically more radical and aggressive," she said of the project. "I wanted to show that side of womanhood. My aunt basically was a Foxy Brown — she rode a Harley, she wanted to be an architect, and she was beautiful. She was way ahead of her time."
Watch Grier's Live With Kelly and Mark segment above.
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