Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of “Foxy Brown,” first released in theaters on April 5, 1974, the 74-year-old actress Pam Grier has revealed that she was injured while making the cult classic.
“I still have injuries,” Grier said during an appearance on “Live with Kelly and Mark,” explaining that she had to perform her own stunts in the movie, which follows a woman’s quest to seek revenge on a gang of drug dealers responsible for the murder of her boyfriend.
“I didn’t have a stunt double, so I had to look and appear convincing,” she said, adding, “I got hurt.”
Later in the conversation, Grier said she also suffered injuries on the set of “the first four movies with Roger Corman,” who produced “The Big Doll House,” “Women in Cages,” and “The Big Bird Cage,” all of which she appeared in before filming “Foxy Brown.”
Looking back, she said, “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. And I didn’t start it, it wasn’t me. But I knew I had to do it and I feel it.”
Grier then credited Charlize Theron and others for “just doing martial arts” in movies today. “And be so good at it and have the stunt woman teach you how to make them look good,” she continued. “They make us look good. They make us look like a heroine.”
In fact, Grier had to push for that kind of representation decades prior, while making the blaxploitation film written and directed by Jack Hill. “I was around a global community of women who were doing just that, but never were able to promote what they were doing,” she explained. “We had war, our husbands and fathers and uncles did not come home, so they had to be self-sufficient. And I brought that to Hollywood — and they had never seen it.”
And, as Grier noted, “I had to show that without a sport bra, okay?”
Following the release of “Foxy Brown,” the character went on to become an iconic role for Grier, who has appeared in a number of standout films, including director Quentin Tarantino’s homage “Jackie Brown.” The 1997 crime movie earned the actress a Golden Globe nomination for best actress.
Additionally, her 2010 memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” is being developed into a series. While on “Live with Kelly and Mark,” Grier said that she hopes all the stunt work she had to do makes it into the project. “I hope when we do the production of my life as a series… [I can show] how I did the stunts,” she said.
