{"id":560672,"date":"2026-03-25T22:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T22:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/560672\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T22:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T22:25:09","slug":"pretty-lethal-cast-and-directors-on-ballet-and-female-action-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/560672\/","title":{"rendered":"Pretty Lethal Cast and Directors on Ballet and Female Action Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tVicky Jewson\u2019s action thriller \u201cPretty Lethal<\/a>\u201d opens with five elite ballerinas who can\u2019t stand each other. By the end, they\u2019re covered in blood and finally dancing in sync. Getting there, however, required numb feet and about a month of boot camp in Budapest.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe survival action-thriller, which premiered at SXSW<\/a> and is now streaming on Prime, follows Bones (Maddie Ziegler<\/a>), Princess (Lana Condor), Grace (Avantika Vandanapu), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds) and Zoe (Iris Apatow), five elite but deeply dysfunctional dancers stranded at a roadside inn run by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman<\/a>). When things turn deadly, the women discover that years of grueling ballet training have equipped them with something most people overlook \u2014 a lethal physical skill set.<\/p>\n

\n\tJewson spent the early stages of development embedded with the Royal Ballet Company in London, interviewing prima ballerinas, filming their rehearsals and asking them about the pain threshold required to do what they do. What she found was not the fragile, decorative image ballet has long projected to the outside world.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe ballerina is this perfect, fragile, delicate little creature, and sometimes that\u2019s how the world perceives femininity,\u201d Jewson tells Variety. \u201cThey undermine our strength, and they undermine our grit, and so I felt like it was a perfect moment to really bust open that stereotype.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer research fed directly into the film\u2019s signature fighting style, which Jewson and the cast call \u201cballet-fu\u201d \u2014 a combination of ballet and kung fu. She brought on the stunt team at 87North, whose credits include \u201cBullet Train\u201d and \u201cThe Fall Guy,\u201d with one firm directive: dance first, fight second.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI wanted to design every fight move from a dance move. We wanted to create elegant grit,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s what ballet-fu is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe cast spent close to a month in training before production began in Budapest, working with both stunt coordinators and ballet choreographers simultaneously. Each actress was also paired with a stunt double and a ballet double. The pointe shoes pull double duty in the film \u2014 at one point the ballerinas jam a blade into the toe box and wield them as a weapon \u2014 but on set, they were just painful.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI grossly underestimated how painful it would be to wear them all day long,\u201d Condor says. \u201cThere were days where I\u2019m like, my feet can\u2019t handle it.\u201d Ziegler adds that the only relief came hours into each day. \u201cThe best part is when you hit hour five or six and your feet just go numb. Then you can move through the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a trained dancer who has not been far from a studio since childhood, Ziegler performed many of her own sequences \u2014 including multiple ballet kicks that send the inn\u2019s attackers crashing unconscious to the floor. Condor, who trained at the Joffrey Ballet company as a child before pivoting to acting, also handled a substantial portion of her own work, allowing the camera to go places it otherwise could not.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAvantika, left, and Maddie Ziegler in \u201cPretty Lethal\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9MGM\/Courtesy Everett Collectio<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Ziegler, returning to formal ballet after a stretch of focusing primarily on acting required some recalibration.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI hadn\u2019t done specifically ballet for a bit,\u201d she says. \u201cI was very nervous. But within the first week, my body just remembers. It\u2019s all my body knows. I\u2019m so grateful it hadn\u2019t left me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the film\u2019s more distinctive creative choices centers on Simmonds\u2019 character, who is deaf. The actress, herself deaf, pushed early in development to transform a hearing role into a Deaf one. Jewson then researched deaf dancers in the ballet world and built their experience into the film\u2019s sound design, letting audiences slip in and out of Chloe\u2019s perspective during the action sequences. \u201cI wanted to lean into that as a superpower,\u201d Jewson says. \u201cThis movie is all about taking perceived weaknesses from a prejudiced world and flipping them on their head.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Simmonds, the key to unlocking the character came from her choreographer, who pulled her aside during training and told her to stop following the other dancers. \u201cHe said, \u2018Millie, find your inner dancer. Stop following the other girls. You don\u2019t need to listen to the music,’\u201d she recalls. All of the training comes to a head in the final bar fight, where the girls tear through a room full of attackers as Tchaikovsky\u2019s \u201cSwan Lake\u201d plays overhead.<\/p>\n

\n\tApatow, who plays Chloe\u2019s hearing sister Zoe, learned ASL from scratch for the role. By the end of production, Simmonds was running informal signing tests with the rest of the cast on set during breaks.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAvantika, left, Millicent Simmonds and Iris Apatow in \u201cPretty Lethal\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9MGM\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s release couldn\u2019t be better timed, arriving just weeks after Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s widely condemned comments characterizing ballet<\/a> as a dying art form that received backlash from the Met Opera to Misty Copeland herself. For the ensemble as a whole, Jewson said the goal was always for the team dynamic to feel genuinely earned \u2014 starting the film fractured and stitching itself together through shared survival. Ballerinas, Jewson argues, have spent their entire lives training their bodies to absorb pain, move in perfect sync and perform under pressure. The world just never expected them to use any of that offensively.<\/p>\n

\n\tVandanapu says the message she hopes audiences leave with is simpler than any of the action choreography the film required.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s no final girl and everyone teams up at the end,\u201d she says. \u201cI hope young women walk away feeling empowered to embrace harmony and cohesiveness. These are five women shown in an incredibly gritty, empowered, non-sexual light. We don\u2019t get to see female characters like that in action movies, almost ever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vicky Jewson\u2019s action thriller \u201cPretty Lethal\u201d opens with five elite ballerinas who can\u2019t stand each other. By the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":560673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,216621,337,216622,50926,11772],"class_list":{"0":"post-560672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-maddie-ziegler","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-pretty-lethal","14":"tag-sxsw","15":"tag-uma-thurman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}