Interview with Stuntwoman LaFaye Baker pt 1 |

LaFaye Baker is an amazing woman with some amazing talents. She has done stunt work on some of my favorite movies including Blade, Independence Day, Naked Gun 33 1/3, and Lethal Weapon 4. Her resume also includes Mission: Impossible 3, The Nutty Professor, True Lies, and the list just keeps going to include television shows, commercials, and music videos. You can check out her resume with her lengthy list of skills at http://www.stuntwomen.com. I had the great pleasure of talking to LaFaye for quite some time about her career and the projects she has going on right now.

I started off by asking her how she got into stunt work initially and she told me how she was actually working as a probation officer before she became a stuntwoman. There was another officer who would work with her every now and then and he mentioned becoming a stunt performer to LaFaye. She said that she “passed on it and didn’t think much of it” at first. Well, that person kept bringing it up whenever they worked together until LaFaye actually considered it. She mentioned becoming a stunt person to another person she was working with who turned out to have a friend who was a stunt coordinator. “How ironic was that!” So she started working out and training for some stunts on Sundays. And the rest is history. She got a call about three months after she started training and she accepted her first job. “I didn’t really know too much. I was still kind of green because no one told me about the business, but working out and hearing about it piqued my interest, so I continued to work out.” After that her career snowballed into what it is today.

LaFaye continued to share her story of her first job with us. It was kind of funny to hear that she started off as a shy person who didn’t want a lot of attention drawn to her. Her first job was on location for In the Heat of the Night, and she was horrified when a limo showed up at her house to take her to the airport. Here’s the story:

“Oh my god, my first job is on location! I don’t know any of the pros. I’m oblivious to everything. And then there’s the limousine! I don’t need a limousine because I live like 5 minutes from the airport. That was overwhelming because this was in 1989, maybe ’88 so I wasn’t familiar with any of that. But the studio argued, ‘No no no, we have to have a limousine pick you up because from the time you leave home to the time you get back, that’s the time you get paid.’ I was so embarrassed because I don’t like a lot of attention. I get to the airport and get on the plane and they’re like ‘Hi Ms. Baker, How are you?’ I was like why is she talking to me like that, why is she calling my name. She said, ‘Ms. Baker you’re going to be sitting in 2B.’ I was like oh my god, that’s in first class. So I sit in 2B and I’m still in awe because I can’t believe I got a limousine and my first job is on location down in Georgia for a whole week. I get to Atlanta. I get off the plane and there’s a big sign with MGM studios and my name at the gate. So I’m a little chill and embarrassed so I don’t walk to the guy right away. So I walk all the way around the back, and I tap the guy on the shoulder and say, whispering ‘I’m LaFaye Baker.’ So I get to the set and everyone is calling me LaFaye Baker and I ‘m like this is a trip because everyone is calling my name. I get to the production office they give me an envelope. I never even looked at the envelope. Come to find out the envelope has some money in it for the week. So I was like this is kind of cool. The real cool part is that I got there on a Sunday, and I didn’t work until Thursday and Friday. So I was on a week contract and I only worked two days. So I stayed in my hotel kickin’ it, doing nothing but enjoying life. So I was like ‘Hmm, maybe I can do this.’ And from that time on I start enjoying, basically, what these people do and the lifestyle. So I thought ‘Ok, maybe I can do this tonight and then train even harder so I can do other things pertaining to action and stunt work.”
After that experience, she got her name out there to everyone she could in order to get work. She said, “What I’ve found is that you try to get your experience by trying to get people to get to know you and by showing up on the set and trying to get your name out there by being like ‘Hi, my name is LaFaye, and I’m a stuntwoman, and I’d love to work with you’.”

Her first job on In the Heat of the Night was to double Crystal Fox, a lead character, for a “near car miss” where she had to jump out of the way of a speeding car into some boxes. It sounds like she had a blast on her first job and got the royal treatment.

Being a stuntwoman is not all fame and glory however. There are injuries and also the added stress of how your family and friends will accept your line of work. LaFaye talked about how her mom didn’t really think much of her becoming a stuntwoman because she had tried several other things before. However, that soon changed once LaFaye kept on performing stunts. “Then when she started learning more about it and when I had a serious accident, she couldn’t stand it at all. Now she hates it.”

Sometimes we just assume that all stunts are under tight supervision and are really safe. They are for the most part but there’s always that risk of something going wrong and someone getting hurt. LaFaye was performing a motorcycle job for a music video called “Ready or Not” when she suffered a serious accident. “I had successfully completed the motorcycle jump, which was an easy jump, but there was a cannon on the right and to the left. So, when I came up from the jump there was a wall of smoke, and I panicked because I’d already practiced this before and there was no smoke. Supposedly [the director] had told someone to radio to me that there was going to be a smoke machine but I’d never heard anything about it in the safety meeting… So, I got up there, and I didn’t know where I was going and I accidentally hit my chin on the speedometer. I broke my mandible in three places and broke my jaw at both the joints.”

Just a small miscommunication can cause great harm to stunt performers. That lovely injury earned LaFaye 10 hours of reconstructive surgery and three screws to her left and right jaw and a plate in her chin. However, despite the major injury, she recovered well and very quickly. She was only in the hospital for 5 days before being released. She stated, “Yeah, I always tell people that, here’s how I look at stuff: I never smoked joints or got high, so my system was not affected that much because the cells were still there and working properly. I was also in pretty good shape from all the working out.” Now I’m a true believer, just as LaFaye is, that being in good shape can help you recover quickly from setbacks.

Injuries are a hard thing to deal with on the job, especially for stunt performers. While minor injuries happen all the time, not a whole lot of attention gets paid to them. “I’ve been doing sports all my life, and when you’re playing gymnastics or volleyball it’s [injuries] no big deal. But when it’s something that affects you majorly, like something’s broken, then you’ll know, but if it’s something minor you kind of shrug it off. It’s almost kind of a hush-hush thing because nobody wants to know if you’re hurt. You think that if you’re going to get hurt, they won’t want to work with you on a show. It’s kind of the same thing if you get pregnant. You can’t work while you’re having the baby, but people sometimes think that even after you’ve had the baby you still can’t work.”

LaFaye competed in gymnastics in high school and college. She also used to ice skate competitively and hula hoop. I thought that was a very unique talent. It turns out that she actually broke the world record in 1975 and received a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for twirling the most hula hoops at one time. She twirled 58 hula hoops at one time. And one of the rules is to keep the hoops between the shoulders and hips. That’s a lot of hoops to have in such a short space. Good job, LaFaye! That is an impressive feat.

I wondered what drew her to hula hooping and how she got started. She said, “Well, it wasn’t that I wanted to get the world record. There was a park across from school, and I saw that they’d scheduled these hula-hoopers to go there. I saw that there was a lady who was doing a hula-hoop class and I was really interested. After I’d been there a while she started giving me extra attention because I was a bit more focused and a bit better than some of the other kids, and I was really creative. It was a bit like a lot of things in my life. I stumble into them and sometimes get bored with them quickly and move on, but I love hula-hooping.”