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Open in new tab Telly beauty Michelle Keegan is an all-action girl hooked on danger and adrenaline, her stunt double says.
Lookalike Nadine Theron describes the petite actress as one tough cookie and reveals how the former Corrie star insisted on tackling her own stunts as they filmed BBC1 drama Our Girl 2.
That included being winched up by a helicopter and leaping across balconies three storeys high. Michelle, 28, was so athletic and gritty that Nadine believes she could even give James Bond a run for his money. Nadine – a trained dancer who has also worked as Claire Danes’ stunt double in Homeland – says: “Michelle is a female 007, very similar to Daniel Craig in her desire to do her own action shots.
“She has a real physicality. She could be the first female Bond.” Last year the Sunday Mirror revealed Michelle, married to ex-TOWIE star Mark Wright, had signed a £250,000 deal to play a bullet-dodging army medic in Africa.
She agreed to be part of the five-part series after returning from honeymoon in the Maldives and Dubai with Mark, 29, who is now a DJ on Heart FM. The first series of Our Girl, which attracted 6.3 million viewers, was based in Afghanistan and followed medic Molly Dawes – played by Lacey Turner, who has since returned to EastEnders.
Michelle plays Cpl Georgie Lane – one of the few women soldiers in the show – and has revelled in the action scenes. Her character is rescued from an Al Shabaab compound in East Africa by a heartthrob soldier named Elvis and winched up to a helicopter. The intrepid actress insisted on being lifted herself for the first few seconds before Nadine took over for the real thing.
Nadine adds: “Michelle did a lot of her own stunts. I was there to guide her with better ways to fall, but she’s a tough cookie and game for everything.
“She’s tiny, minute, that’s why I was so scared for her to do her own stunts, but I couldn’t believe how tough she was.
“Michelle loves danger and the adrenaline of doing what not a lot of girls can do, she felt really independent and accomplished being able to do her stunts herself.
“She told me she feels like she must live on the edge and try things she’s never tried before because you never know when the opportunity comes round again. I’m exactly the same.
I said to her, “You can’t be so good because you’re going to take my job from me’, but she was loving it.” In the series, due to be aired later this year, Michelle’s character is on a dangerous mission in Kenya.
Speaking after the release of promo shots showing her in fatigues, Michelle said: “The first time I put on the uniform it felt quite surreal but then I immediately felt the sense of duty – as if I was in the military.”
The crew filmed in South Africa for two months. Midway through the gruelling schedule, Michelle was joined in South Africa by hubby Mark. He had revealed how tough it would be for them being so far apart, admitting before she left: “We’ve never been apart for so long so it will be difficult. But it’ll be fine, I’m going to get out there when I can.”
Michelle found the best way of coping was to throw herself into the role. In one scene she was strung up in shackles, hooded and tossed into a dog cage by evil members of Al Shabaab, a jihadist terror group based in East Africa.
Stunt co-ordinator Paul Pieterse said: “Michelle wanted to do as many stunts as she could herself and the BBC warned me that she was very gung-ho.”
“I winched Michelle up about two metres to a helicopter and we cheated camera angles to make it look as if she was the one ascending. She got manhandled very roughly by Al Shabaab. I put padding on her, softened the ground where I could but she was seriously thrown about, pulled around by her hair, and shoved very hard and had a hood over her head.”
“I made sure she could see through the hood but she took a real tumble to the ground. There are sequences where she gets kicked off the back of a 4×4. I think people will be gripped and shocked by it.”
“I protected her as much as I could but she was game for everything. She didn’t want me to babysit her and it really shows in her performance that she did a lot herself.”