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Meet the ex-JFS pupil who left the circus to be a stuntwoman

Asked what she wanted to do after leaving school, Erin Jameson answered honestly: “I want to join the circus.”

November 17, 2022 15:08
erin 6
4 min read

When Erin Jameson filled out a careers form at JFS she never imagined anyone would read it.

Asked what she wanted to do after leaving school, Jameson answered honestly: “I want to join the circus.”

A rabbi at the school later questioned whether this was really the case. And, yes, it was.
After completing her A Levels, Jameson, a Sinai primary school alumna, turned down an offer to study Sport and Exercise Science at Birmingham University so she could pursue a career in the circus.

“I spent most of my childhood cartwheeling around. I was upside down more than the right way up,” laughs South Africa-born Jameson. “I just could not see myself doing a nine-to-five.”

A Great Britain athlete who competed in acrobatic gymnastic competitions across Europe from Portugal to Belgium while studying for her GCSE exams, Jameson went on to master acrobatics in a live-performance setting.

Soon, her passion saw her perform in the West End, where she appeared in Carmen at the Royal Albert Hall and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies, before going on to travel the world with the Batman Live stage show.

On tour, she would double as a young Bruce Wayne, as well as performing a trapeze act in the character of Poison Ivy — a period that she describes as “the best time ever”.
But at the age of 25, she turned her attention to a long-term ambition. She wanted to become a stuntwoman. And she was prepared to put in a lot of hard work to make that dream come true.

Now aged 32, she has appeared in high-profile movie and TV series, from the upcoming Barbie film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, to the House of the Dragon series, where she doubles for actress Milly Alcock as a young Rhaenyra Targaryen. For this, she has tested iconic “flying dragon” mechanisms and taken part in night shoots, getting home at 5am.

She specialises in applying her martial arts training to film “elevated fight” scenes or being “blown away” in explosions using wirework.

In Amazon thriller series Hanna, Jameson was actually hit by a car for one scene. “I tend to tell my parents what happened at work afterwards,” she says.

“You feel sore afterwards and you feel like you have taken a hit, but it’s more about the way you land. I think gymnastics helps with spatial awareness and knowing where you are in the air. But you do hope you can get the scene done in one shot.”

But for Jameson getting the jobs was no easy feat. While some stunt performers do represent themselves using social media as a promotional platform, she says she knew that joining the British Stunt Register would open a lot of doors.

To get on the register, she needed to master at least six sporting disciplines, reaching “instructor” level in them all. So she undertook training in gymnastics, martial art of kung fu, rock climbing, trampolining, high-diving and scuba diving.

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