People ask whether stunt women are rare. It is one of the few questions in this trade that can be answered with a number, so it is worth answering carefully.
The only serious public figure: ten, then fifty
Estelle Darnault is a French stunt performer. She doubled Michelle Rodriguez on the tenth Fast and Furious and Selena Gomez on Emilia Perez, and spent eight months in Budapest on Moon Knight. In September 2024, in the Vénissieux town paper, she gave the two figures everyone has quoted since: « Il n'existait en France qu'une petite dizaine de cascadeuses », there were only about ten stunt women in France, and « Aujourd'hui, nous sommes une cinquantaine de femmes à exercer ce métier », today around fifty women do this job.
Ten to fifty in a decade. That is the only attributed, dated estimate of the profession in France I have been able to find. There is no official register, no stunt union, no public statistic. The number comes from a working performer counting her colleagues, which remains the most reliable method available.
What the number does not say
Fifty, in a country of sixty-eight million people, is a village. A production needs one or two stunt women at a time, rarely more, and it hires them through coordinators who have worked with the same people for fifteen years. The growth is real. The door is still narrow.
The number also hides the split. Some of those fifty work mainly as doubles, some mainly in fight, a handful coordinate. Those are different jobs under one word.
Why the count is so hard to make
There is no official register of stunt performers in France and no union specific to the trade. Stunt performers fall under the performers' framework, in which they are named, but no institution keeps a list of who is actually working.
The only lists that exist are voluntary directories you sign yourself up to. A directory counts the people who registered, not the people who work, and it adds beginners, established professionals and accounts abandoned three years ago into one total. Which is why a working performer counting the colleagues she meets on set is, paradoxically, more reliable than a database.
It also means the totals you read elsewhere deserve suspicion. When an article announces several hundred stunt performers in France, it is counting registrations. When Estelle Darnault says fifty, she is counting women she runs into on sets.
The film that made the work visible
In 2022 Cascadeuses, a documentary by Elena Avdija, followed three stunt women: Virginie, Petra and Estelle. It is a Swiss and French co-production. It won the Focus competition at the Zurich Film Festival and then Best Documentary at the Swiss Film Awards in 2023.
What the film shows, and what I had read nowhere before seeing it, is the nature of the work actually on offer. In a cinema that writes few action roles for women, a large share of a stunt woman's working days consists of playing women who are hit, thrown and dragged. That is not a grievance, it is a description of demand. How many of us there are is a less interesting question than what we are asked to do.
Recognition exists, but not where people think
The stunt awards landscape is almost unknown outside the trade, and a lot of wrong information circulates in it.
The Taurus World Stunt Awards were created in 2001 by Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of Red Bull. They are the reference professional awards, and their categories describe the actual work: Best Fight, Best High Work, Best Stunt Rigging, Best Work with a Vehicle, Hardest Hit, and one category specific to women's work, Best Overall Stunt by a Stunt Woman.
Virginie Arnaud, a French stunt performer and fight arranger, won a Taurus World Stunt Award in the Best Fight category. That is a fact and it is checkable. You will sometimes read, including on pages about her, that she was Oscar nominated for a fight. That nomination does not exist, because the category does not exist: the Academy has never had a competitive award for stunt work, and the very first one will be presented in 2028. The confusion is understandable and it is still wrong, and it does no favours to a career that needs no inflation.
The stunt Oscar arrives in 2028, not 2027
The second correction is bigger. In April 2025 the Academy announced a new award for stunt design. It will be presented for the first time at the 100th ceremony, in 2028, and it will honour films released in 2027.
Headlines that say "from 2027" are naming the eligibility year, not the ceremony. That looks like a technicality. It stops looking like one when it is your trade that has waited a century to be named in a category at all.
And in Belgium?
No number. There is no Belgian stunt register, no professional association, no count of any kind. The country has an established stunt company, Into Action in Aalst, founded in 2002, and stunt classes in Anderlecht that opened in 2016. It has nobody counting.
In practice that means no Belgian stunt woman can tell you how many of us there are, and the only way to find out would be to phone each one. I would be very surprised if the total ran past the fingers of two hands.
What it means to be arriving now
In 2024 I sat the selection course for the two-year programme at Campus Univers Cascades. Six candidates were taken out of twenty.
That ratio says more than any argument about where the profession stands. Far more people want in than there are places, and at the same time there are far fewer working professionals than a European action industry actually needs. Both are true at once. The trade is opening to women quickly in percentage terms and remains tiny in absolute ones.
When a production looks for a stunt woman who speaks Dutch and can also carry a dialogue scene, it is not choosing from a list of fifty names. It finds three.
Sources: Expressions, Vénissieux, 21 September 2024 · Cascadeuses, Elena Avdija, 2022 · Taurus World Stunt Awards · 100th Academy Awards