Sept.
28, 2006 Inside: Bouncing into Stardom
Leigh Hennessy Parlayed Her Trampoline Ability Into
a Movie Career
By GENE WILLIAMS
Managing Editor
On the first day of shooting, they tried
to drown Leigh Hennessy.
Thank god Kevin Costner was around.
Hennessy, who has spent her Hollywood career
doubling for Demi Moore
and Tea Leoni on movies such as G.I. Jane and Bad
Boys, plays a woman
whose boat is sinking in the Bering Sea in Costner's
new film, The
Guardian, which opens Friday. As the movie begins,
Hennessy, billed as
"drowning wife"
and her onscreen mate, cleverly billed as "drowning
husband,"
are, well, drowning. Along comes Costner, an ace
Coast Guard rescue
specialist nearing the end of his heroic career,
to save the day. He jumps
in. Hennessy goes under. Costner does, too. Much
swallowing of water
and sputtering and being slammed around by 9-foot
waves ensues.
The look of panic you might see on Hennessy's face
won't be entirely
fake.
"It was dangerous," says
Hennessy, the former Lafayette trampoline
champion turned stuntwoman who is beginning to make
a real name for herself
as an actress. "It was crazy to be honest.
In the scenes where we're
above water, there's water in your mouth constantly,
and your head would
go under and there'd be water in your eyes. We were
doing that for 16
hours straight."
And then there were the underwater scenes where
Hennessy and Costner
had to start acting 26-feet down. "The barometric
pressure at that depth
is (high) and we had to float to the top and when
you do that, you have
to let air out of your lungs slowly to equalize
the pressure or you get
the bends."
It was challenging says Hennessy in a telephone
interview from her home
in Van Nuys, Calif., but worth it. This is finally
a movie where she
won't have to look for her name lumped in with 20
other stunt performers
at the bottom of the credits. This time she'll see
Leigh Hennessy next
to "drowning wife." It won't be up top,
near Costner's, but it will at
least be there on a line of its own.
And heck, she's in a movie with KEVIN COSTNER, one
of the biggest stars
in the Hollywood firmament.
Costner, of course, has starred in such movies as
The Bodyguard,
Silverado, Robin Hood, Tin Cup, JFK and Dances With
Wolves, for which,
somehow, he won an Academy Award for direction.
He can get a movie made --
even ones like The Postman and Waterworld -- on
his name alone, and he
can make little films like Field of Dreams into
blockbusters. But it is
said he can be controlling and bossy and demanding.
If that's true, Hennessy never saw it, even in the
worst of times.
"He took very good
care of me," says Hennessy. "Your first
day on the
set you don't know anybody and they take you to
this 100-foot-by-100-foot tank of water and tell you
to jump in and have a good time. When we'd swim out to our spots, he made sure he went with
me. It would get cold in the water -- we were shooting in December, winter,
in Shreveport and no matter how they tried to keep the water warm,
it would get cold -- and Kevin would keep me warm."
Did
she ever see his temper spike?
"In
any stressful situation you're going to see that
kind behavior in
people, even Kevin," she says. "But in
my experience he was always
positive and supportive."
Hennessy grew up in Lafayette, the daughter of Benjamin
Hennessy, a UL
professor who taught physical education and coached
the trampoline
team. From an early age, she learned how to perform
in front of people. In
college, she starred on the UL team and went on
to win both national
and world championship trampoline titles.
There being no professional trampoline leagues in,
well, anywhere,
Leigh went to work first as a teacher, then as an
aide to former U.S. Rep.
Jimmy Hayes. While she was a good teacher and loved
Washington D.C.,
there was something missing in her life.
"At some point I felt I was in a career I was
supposed to do, not one I wanted to do," she
says. "It wasn't natural for me, I never felt
that was my calling."
She wanted something that would allow her to be
more active, to get up
off her backside and make use of those athletic
genes. "I figured I'd
move to California thinking, well heck, they climb
rocks, ride bikes out
there. It seemed like the thing to do. I knew three
people out there."
But that didn't stop her. She sold everything she
had, bought an old
station wagon for $600 and drove to Los Angeles
with barely more than the
clothes on her back. She stayed with one of those
three people for a
few weeks, then the other, then the other, all the
while trying to think
of something she could make a living at. She found
it at a nearby gym
that had a trampoline.
"By coincidence
some stunt people worked out at the same gym practicing
their moves," she says. "I caught their
attention. I was pretty good, a
world champion, so they were impressed. One of them
said, 'Hey, you'd
be pretty good doing stunts,' and I said, 'Oh, really?
What do I do?'"
Not long after that, she had an agent and a role
in a Ralph Lauren
commercial. Her first movie was doubling a Tea Leoni
stunt in Bad Boys when
the original stuntwoman refused to jump without
padding from a moving
car. Since then, she's doubled Demi Moore in G.I.
Jane (and got a
separate stunt double credit line), Helen Mirren
and Lucy Liu.
She has lately begun to find more work for directors
looking for "mature" women who need
to be physically fit. Like the "drowning wife."
But don't ask her how mature she actually is, no.
"In this town, if you're 30 you have one
foot in the grave," she says. "If
you're 40, you're dead. Whenever I'm with other
women and they
start talking about birthdays, I don't even participate
in the
conversation. I'm whatever age they want me to be."
It took her a while to learn that lesson, however.
Initially, she was
upfront about her age. That's when she learned the
30-40 rule. "Since
then, I've gotten younger every year."
And she's gotten more adept at her craft. Sure,
she says, "getting hit
by a car is getting hit by a car and there's not
a lot of acting in
that," but she has nevertheless managed to
learn the trade from some of
the best actors in the business. Like Viggo Mortensen,
who slapped her
around in a few G.I. Jane scenes.
"If
you're doubling Demi Moore you have to become her
character just
like she does. I have to run and swim and do everything
as Jordan O'Neil.
So here I am with Viggo and I thought he was going
to kill me. What you
see on the screen is reacting and that's basically
what acting is. I
thought to myself, 'How lucky am I to be working
with Viggo Mortensen?'"
Now she's working with Kevin Costner and even if
it is a mature role,
that's fine with her.
"When I turn
50, I'm going to tell the whole world because that
puts
you in a whole new category, a select group of women
over 50 who can act
and who are physically fit."
And who, not coincidentally, get their own mention
in the closing
credits.
