When Sarah Lezito started messing round with motorbikes at 13, she by no means dreamed that someday she would grow to be the stunt double of a few of Hollywood’s greatest stars.
The French winemaker’s daughter has stood in for Scarlett Johansson — twice — on “Avengers 2” and “Black Widow” and appeared in a dozen movies together with “The Batman”.
The 32-year-old is one in all a really uncommon breed of bike stuntwomen, with a large social media following that helped deliver her from the vineyards of France’s Champagne area to Hollywood.
AFP caught up together with her on her personal private coaching observe amid the in any other case tranquil vineyards close to Epernay, the Champagne capital in northeast France.
Barely astride her purple chrome Kawasaki, she was off down the observe performing stunts with disconcerting dexterity, her lengthy brown hair trailing out of her helmet within the wind.
“This is kind of my temple,” she mentioned after performing a collection of gravity-defying tips together with standing with each ft on high of her 200-kilo machine after which flipping herself onto the handlebars.
“People think I’m working, but it mostly allows me to release all the pressure,” mentioned Lezito, whose fortunate attraction — a plastic beaded bracelet — is wrapped across the throttle of her bike.
The lady now popularly often called the “world stunt champion” (though there is no such thing as a acknowledged world championship) started her acrobatics profession younger on the household holding close to Epernay.
“I fell into stunts by watching videos,” she informed AFP. “No one in my family was in the motor sports world. My father only had an agricultural quad, not at all made for sports, but I started trying to do wheelies with it in a field.”
Then she started posting her stunt movies on YouTube.
But she appeared destined to observe her household into wine and viticulture till she posted a video of a medley of tips someday in March 2013 referred to as “One out of Billion Girls”.
“It was thanks to this video that they noticed me,” she mentioned.
The “they” being the workforce from the Hollywood blockbuster “Avengers 2”.
Just a few months later, she deserted her winemaking research to fly to South Korea to carry out Johansson’s stunts within the film.
Because she “adapted quickly” to stunt work, Lezito determined to go skilled, showing in a number of main motion pictures, together with “Inferno”, “Millennium” and “The Batman” with Zoe Kravitz.
“I met all the actresses I’ve doubled for,” she mentioned.
She has had her moments on among the motion pictures, though she insists she has by no means felt worry on these she does “at home” for social media.
“I had to ride through flames for ‘Bad Girl’, a film which was never released. On paper, it was very simple, but I didn’t have a helmet,” she recalled.
And in the summertime of 2023 whereas filming David Fincher’s “The Killer” in Paris, starring Michael Fassbender, Lezito had a extreme fall.
“I flew off the motorcycle, I wasn’t going very fast but fast enough to land on my head and the helmet cracked.”
She ended up within the emergency room with a head harm.
It “made her think”, she informed AFP, and she or he “decided to take a break” and put her Hollywood profession on maintain.
Lezito now devotes herself to her social media channels, posting movies of her stunts to her greater than 30 million followers — together with 9.5 million on Instagram, some two million greater than MotoGP star Marc Marquez.
Her storage doubles as a studio, together with her YouTube trophies and items from her followers displayed on the partitions.
But it is usually the place she will get her palms soiled repairing her fleet of roughly 10 bikes.
“As long as I enjoy sitting on the motorcycle, I’ll keep doing this,” she mentioned.
© 2025 AFP