Kate: The 'Heartbreaking Blow' That Changed Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Experience
Hollywood is full of indispensable collaborations, be it a longstanding partnership between a filmmaker and an editor or an actor's role as recurring muse. Another crucial relationship is the one between an actor and their stunt double. Some actors go out of their way to champion their intrepid counterparts (cue the requisite Keanu Reeves shout-out). Mary Elizabeth Winstead found her forever stunt person in Hayley Wright.
Winstead and Wright first worked together on "Gemini Man," then paired up once again for 2020's "Birds of Prey." When it came time to shoot the Netflix revenge thriller "Kate," enlisting Wright was a no-brainer.
"[Hayley] is an incredibly positive spirit, she's very bright, she's very hardworking, and I don't know how she does it!" Winstead told Collider in 2021. "By the time I was doing Kate, I was just like, 'Well, Hayley's just my person. I have to bring Hayley with me any time there's action! It's gotta be Hayley!'"
After the pair trained together in Thailand, Wright injured herself on the first day of shooting, forcing her to exit the production. "That was really a heartbreaking blow," Winstead recalled. Not only was Wright hardworking and fearless, but she was an uncanny double down to her body movements, which Winstead attributes to their shared dance backgrounds. The actor had to regroup and do much of the stunts herself, making "Kate" a much different shooting experience than she had anticipated.
Winstead had to do most of her own stunts on Kate
To fill Hayley Wright's shoes, a number of stunt people came to the "Kate" set to film some of the more physical sequences, of which there are many. In the film, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars in the title role as a ruthless assassin at the peak of her powers. While on assignment in Tokyo, Kate discovers she has been poisoned, giving her approximately 24 hours to find the culprit and exact her revenge. Think "Kill Bill" and "Lady Vengeance" meets the heart-pounding time constraints of "24" or "Crank."
"For the most part, on a day to day basis, it was me on my own," Winstead said in the same Collider interview. "It was a different experience than I thought I was having going into it [with] Haley as my partner the whole way."
Winstead does admit that the second string stunt team did the heavy lifting when it came to crashing through walls. "But everything else I did," she added, "which was a lot of fun and makes me very proud to watch the film."
Winstead's hard work paid off, and the result is one of the actresses' finest performance. "Her performance is so dialed in, so crackling with intensity and exhaustion," wrote Matthew Jackson in his official Looper review of "Kate," later adding, "She's proven her mettle as an actor, and thanks to her determined work, this film becomes the showcase she deserves."