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Ayesha Hussain says her mum was relieved when she became a professional stuntwoman because there were a lot more safety precautions on film sets than at the nightclubs where she had been fire-breathing and throwing knives since her early 20s. Now a twice Sag-award nominated stunt performer, with credits on Doctor Who, Gladiator II and Deadpool and Wolverine, 35-year-old Hussain has her heart set on becoming “the female Keanu Reeves slash Jason Statham”.
As part of Hussain’s aim to tackle the lack of representation of south Asian women in the action arena, she joined with Malaysian-British director Jade Ang Jackman to co-found the film collective Babes With Blades. In January, they took over the Rio cinema in London’s Dalston during the London short film festival to showcase a series of action shorts; these included FKA Twigs’ swordsmanship in Sad Day, and Nida Manzoor’s teen action-comedy 7.2. Babes With Blades has also started a print magazine; and taught classes to children from low income households the basics of boxing.
The pair met five years ago when Jackman was looking for the next generation of women of colour in action, and reached out to Hussain about filming a documentary about her life. In the process of making it, they soon became friends. “In most male-dominated fields, in order to be visible you are taught there can only be one. It’s a very competitive thing and it creates competitive edges that make women kind of drown each other out or to use each other as rungs on the ladder,” says Hussain. That’s the complete opposite for what Babes With Blades is all about. “We just constantly uplift each other.”
The resulting short documentary, The Croydon Cowgirl, made in collaboration with Levi’s, follows Hussain learning to ride a horse during her training for the British Stunt Register. “We certainly did not have the money to ride growing up,” says Hussain, who first got on a horse at 30. The coach at the stables put her on a pony that needed breaking in. “We often laugh about this. He was unsold at the time because he was deemed too fiery to ride. She obviously heard I was a stuntwoman and was like, ‘Well, you’re either going to learn to ride or you’re going to die.’”
Hussain was introduced to cowboy culture through an ex-boyfriend, who was a circus performer. But she soon learned that Hollywood’s eurocentric vision of white cowboys wasn’t accurate. “I realised that post-civil war, the only jobs that were left to people that were soldiers or freed slaves was being a cowboy. So one in every four cowboys was black and I was like, ‘Wow I kind of want to be part of that representation as a brown person.’”
That mission is at the core of Babes With Blades. “We are creating visibility for women that are mavericks in whatever their career is, whether it be, you know, action, or sport,” says Hussain. Jackman says that the name of the collective is a “tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that for so long in action, women had less lines than they had clothes on, and that you were kind of the sidekick, the hot girl.”
Jackman adds: “Themes of family and femininity are never broken out of. Women are always vengeful because their whole family has been murdered or they have been raped. I was starting to question: what other stories might we have for women in the action genre?”
Jackman’s mum is half Malaysian-Chinese and so growing up she says she was exposed to the “amazing female leads” of Hong Kong cinema, where women played “pithy characters and not only sidekicks to men”. She was particularly enamoured with Michelle Yeoh, who grew up in her mother’s home town, and is known for performing most of her own stunts in Hong Kong martial arts films The Heroic Trio (1993) and The Stunt Woman (1996); as well as Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning drama Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. At 60, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, where she handled most of the fight choreography.
Even with the surge of feminist horror movies such as The Substance, representation in action cinema is still lagging behind, says Jackman. “There are more and more diverse roles coming for women of colour but these actresses were not necessarily getting action acting roles, or work as stunt doubles,” she says.
In many ways, Hussain says, it was inevitable that she has followed her path; she comes from a line of Rajputs – warrior clans in India that were known for training women in sword combat. But growing up in Croydon in a working-class family with immigrant parents, who were very driven towards an academic version of success, “any pursuits of athleticism were not really on the radar”, says Hussain. As a child, she says, she wanted to be a doctor. “Not seeing people like myself on screen,” she adds, meant “there was nothing to really look up to and be like, oh, that’s possible for me.”
