Here’s Ky Furneaux, acting as a stunt double for Sharon Stone in Catwoman.
Here’s Furneaux, hunting feral goats with a bow and arrow. Here’s Furneaux, at an Adelaide private school, a sea of yellow and white gingham uniforms on manicured green lawns.
Here’s Furneaux, practically sitting on her modem as we talk on WhatsApp, the signal from outback South Australia sketchy. Her only other option is to perch on the roof of her ute, she says, through the slightly awkward delay down the line.
Because we’re both from Adelaide, we naturally chat about the school we went to – the same one, Pembroke.
Until then Furneaux, now 48, had been at a local state school.
“My parents were like, ‘we have got to get her into a private school. She’s never going to pass’,” she says.
She was 19 and headed towards a career in business management or marketing when she broke her back in a car accident. After being bedridden and told she would have only limited mobility – which fortunately turned out not to be the case – she realised she wanted to travel, to be physically challenged and to be outside.
Skip to Vancouver, where she started training with Kirk Jacques, whose website names Scarlett Johansson and Woody Harrelson among his previous clients.
Jacques taught Furneaux “film fighting” – modified kickboxing, taekwondo and weaponry. Furneaux says it was more like “relearning, not learning” to fight.
Initially she had no plans to pursue a career in the movies, but after “three really long, hard years of working my arse off”, an unexpected opportunity arose.
“I just got lucky because Sharon Stone came to town and needed another five foot eight double who knew kickboxing. That was quite a fast track. I felt incredibly out of my depth.”
She expected to start out with small bits – “you might just run out of the way of a car or something” – but soon she was in fight sequences with Halle Berry (Catwoman to Stone’s villainous Laurel Hedare).
Furneaux spent about 16 years doubling for stars, including Jennifer Garner and Anne Hathaway. She won the Taurus World Stunt Award for her work on the set of Thor, doubling for Jaimie Alexander who played alongside Chris Hemsworth.
After 16 years of bumps and bruises – and an incident where she tore her hamstring off the bone – Furneaux was starting to quieten down. But she was still doing bits and pieces of stuntwork in the United States when her sister called her. It was early 2020.
“She said: ‘You need to decide today where you’re going to be for the next two years. If Australia is where you want to be you need to be on a flight tomorrow’,” Furneaux says.
She chose to sit out the pandemic in Australia, and her partner Calem O’Grady joined her. Before long they were shooting a documentary at her cousin’s farm near Peterborough, about three hours north of Adelaide. That’s where she had first started hunting goats.
“I was vegetarian … then I decided if I was going to eat meat, I wanted to do it in the most sustainable way possible, which is hunting your own meat,” she says.
“And I really don’t like guns. So I picked up a bow and arrow and it just felt right.”
I ask for her favourite goat recipe, and she defers to O’Grady’s talents. The former chef makes a mean goat curry.
“He puts the bones in it as well, so you get all the marrow, and it’s really, it’s just delicious,” she says.
Asked how her friends and family have reacted to her goat hunting past-time after her Catwoman-hunting past, she says: “I don’t think anyone’s surprised at anything I do any more.
“I think I’m just wired a little bit differently. I said ‘yeah, I’m going to get into extreme survival now’.”
Extreme survival, Furneaux points out, is not like being a doomsday prepper. It’s being able to survive off the land, to hunt your own food, to understand nature.
The line starts to crackle and fade as Furneaux talks about upcoming projects. A book due out (“the first survival guide of its kind written by a female”), another television show. Surviving, extremely.
I ask her what she’s afraid of.
“Every time before I get up in front of a big crowd, I’m terrified,” she says, acknowledging it’s part of the gig to promote her work and as a motivational speaker.
Here’s Ky Furneaux. Hollywood stunt double, extreme survivalist, hunter of goats, afraid of public speaking.
