Pam Grier is opening up about how she still has injuries from her time on the set of Foxy Bown.
The actress stopped by Live With Kelly and Mark on Friday to celebrate 50 years since the Jack Hill film was released. Foxy Brown follows a vigilante who takes a job as a high-class prostitute to get revenge on the people who killed her boyfriend.
“I didn’t have a stunt double, so I had to look and appear convincing,” Grier told Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos about the film. “I got hurt. … I have injuries.”
She explained that, at the time, she was surrounded by a community of women who had to be self-sufficient because their husbands, fathers and uncles were at war, and she brought that independence with her to Hollywood.
“It took years to prepare men in a patriarchal society to see a woman do martial arts, jump around, do stunts,” the Jackie Brown star said. “They weren’t prepared for it, and they found it offensive, and they oppressed a lot of our womanhood.”
The actress shared that the upcoming production of a project based on her memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, will detail her work with Roger Corman early in her film career and how she also suffered injuries on those sets.
“I didn’t think I’d walk away,” she said. “Every episode was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore until I get a stunt double.’ To show what it took to prepare our audience to accept a woman in a masculine role, which it is not today, 50 years later, I didn’t start it — it wasn’t me — but I knew I had to do it.”
Grier concluded by praising actresses like Charlize Theron and others for “just doing martial arts and they call them franchises and be so good at it and have the stunt women teach you how to make them look good, and they give us an industry. They make us look good. They make us look like a heroine.”