10 Fantasy Actors Who Do Their Own Stunts

The fantasy genre provides the opportunity for movie lovers to become immersed in characters and worlds beyond imagination, but the reality of creating them often involves a great deal of technical work. The actors who are bringing fantasy media to life face many difficulties, including interacting with props and environments that they can’t see, learning complex action choreography, and doing harrowing stunts.

Actors who perform their own stunts in fantasy movies make them more believable to fans, and they’re integral to ensuring the carefully created world-building remains intact. Whether they’re wielding magic swords, flying through the air, or running from fire-breathing dragons, these are all the fantasy actors who do their own stunt work.

10 Viggo Mortensen

There’s mention on the DVD commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers of Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn of Arathorn famously taking the sword Anduril home with him to learn what it felt like to carry its weight every day, as well as him training for hours on location with swordmaster Bob Anderson to perfect his skills as one of the best swordsman of Middle-Earth.

In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mortensen did the vast majority of his stunts, a risky undertaking which caused him to be injured several times. In one scene in The Two Towers in which Aragorn kicks a metal helmet, he actually broke one of his toes. And of course perhaps most famous of all, a scene reported in a list of injuries from EW revealed a chipped tooth.

9 Angelina Jolie

Having starred in plenty of action movies involving harrowing stunts like Tomb Raider, Wanted and Salt, Angelina Jolie has had plenty of experience training to do her own stunt work, which became imperative when she played the titular dark fairy in Disney’s Maleficent.

In the movie, Jolie played the fae who cursed Aurora to sleep forever, but the fairytale deviated quite a bit from the original story and animated feature, involving Jolie needing to be suspended on a special harness to simulate flight. Things got even more exciting in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil when Maleficent found a colony of dark fae, and waged war in flight, though with so many actors on wires she had to be careful not to careen into any of them.

8 Orlando Bloom

Since the early days of his career, Orlando Bloom has become synonymous with some of the most popular fantasy franchises in cinema history, namely Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings; the latter which saw him star as Legolas Greenleaf, the elven archer he would later reprise in The Hobbit trilogy over a decade later. He currently stars in the fantasy series Carnival Row.

Of his stunts in The Lord of the Rings, he did as many of them as Peter Jackson would allow, even to the point of injury (much like his co-star Viggo Mortensen). He learned how to fire a bow and ride horses, both skills he would reuse when The Hobbit trilogy began production.

7 Milla Jovovich

Though her fantasy movies often overlap with science fiction and horror, there’s no denying the beguiling and athletic Milla Jovovich knows how to make even the most physically demanding feats look effortless no matter what genre she’s in.

In movies with incredibly fantastical environments like The Fifth Element, Ultraviolet, and most recently Hellboy, she seems at home in the middle of the action. In Ultraviolet, she was trained in gymnastics and sword-fighting to make her thrilling action sequences seem believable.

6 Jason Momoa

Since becoming a breakout star playing Kal Drogo in the popular medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones, Jason Momoa has been a part of several epic movies involving magic and mayhem, including the remake of Conan the Barbarian, DC’s Aquaman, and soon the remake of Dune.

For Game of Thrones, Momoa had training to ride horses in order to play a Dothraki warlord, but he’d already worked around them on the set of Conan the Barbarian. Speaking to Metro UK, he explained that he broke ribs, cracked his spine, and nearly died doing stunts for the high-fantasy action movie.

5 Kate Beckinsale

With five movies in the action fantasy Underworld franchise as part of her filmography, not to mention the fantasy horror adventure Van Helsing, Kate Beckinsale could never make another fantasy movie again and still be considered one of its greatest champions.

Speaking with MTV, Beckinsale explained how despite not considering herself very athletically inclined, the crew involved in movies like Underworld and its sequels helped shape her into someone who looks like a graceful badass (even if she doesn’t think so).

4 Luke Evans

Appearing recently in such genre fare as the supernatural thriller The Alienist, Luke Evans is no stranger to the world of fantasy. Over the last decade, the robust Englishman has appeared in several prominent high-fantasy epics, including Immortals, Dracula Untold, Beauty and the Beast, and of course The Hobbit trilogy.

Talking to Harpers Bazaar about both becoming Gaston in Beauty and the Beast and Bard the Bowman for The Hobbit, he explained that he did as much of the stunt work and fight scenes as both Disney and Peter Jackson would let him get away with, because “when it comes to precision and stunt choreography and learning a new craft”, he’s incredibly eager and precise.

3 Kristen Stewart

Whether she’s in Twilight or Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart uses her physicality and sense of movement to convey a story, even if it defies belief. When she took on the role of Snow White, she had to learn how to ride horses and engage in exciting medieval battle skirmishes.

At the 2017 Wonder Con she told fans about her experience, saying “I got to jump off cliffs and ride horses, and that terrifies me. I was really, really not happy about having to do all that [horseback riding]. I don’t like that… I fell off a horse once and hurt myself really badly.” Despite the pain, she persevered, selling the more difficult stunts in the movie.

2 Mads Mikkelsen

A classically trained dancer for many years in his youth, Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen boasts a great degree of proprioception. Knowing the limits of his own physicality and knowing how to contort his body has led him to perform his own stunts in popular fantasy movies like Clash of the Titans, King Arthur, and Doctor Strange.

For both Clash of the Titans and Doctor Strange, he performed extensive wire work (as seen in this clip from Marvel Entertainment), made popular decades ago in movies like The Matrix. Whether playing the hero or the villain, he brings a gracefulness and a brutality to his stunt work.

1 Eva Green

While the mercurial Eva Green has been known to make Bond movies and independent films, a large portion of her filmography is dedicated to the fantasy genre with movies like 300: Rise of an Empire, several Tim Burton movies including Dark Shadows, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, and the fantasy horror series Penny Dreadful.

She explained that for Tim Burton’s Dumbo she had to face her fear of heights in order to portray a dazzling trapeze artist, something she didn’t think she could do until she received training from circus performers and was soon soaring hundreds of feet up in the air.

About The Author

Kayleena Pierce-Bohen
(1343 Articles Published)

Kayleena has been raised on Star Wars and Indiana Jones from the crib. A film buff, she has a Western collection of 250+ titles and counting that she’s particularly proud of. When she isn’t writing for ScreenRant, CBR, or The Gamer, she’s working on her fiction novel, lifting weights, going to synthwave concerts, or cosplaying. With degrees in anthropology and archaeology, she plans to continue pretending to be Lara Croft as long as she can.

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