Jahnel Curfman on a Fourth Emmy Nomination and the Wire-and-Fire Rigging Behind “Stranger Things”
- Jahnel Curfman received a fourth Emmy nomination for stunt coordination on "Stranger Things."
- Her team built levitation gags, wire work with fire, and fights against creatures added later.
- She spent three years on the "Avatar" performance-capture team before moving into stunt work.
Posted: September 4, 2026
Jahnel Curfman picked up her fourth Emmy nomination this year for stunt coordination on Stranger Things, and she is the only person nominated across all three of the Emmys' stunt categories in the same year — a distinction that says as much about the breadth of her department work as it does about any single sequence.
The Stranger Things job is the kind of coordination problem that does not read on screen. Curfman's team built levitation gags, wire work combined with fire, and choreography staged around creatures that were not there — performers hitting marks, selling contact and taking impacts off an eyeline with nothing in it, then handing the plate to visual effects. Six weeks of night shoots in Georgia, in weather, on top of that: the rigging has to be reset and re-checked in the cold and dark, take after take, and the safety margin has to hold at hour eleven the same way it did at hour one.
Her route in is worth noting for anyone mapping a career. Curfman came up through James Cameron's Avatar in 2006, spending three years on the performance-capture team before moving into stunt work proper — a background in movement-for-camera rather than a pure fight or gymnastics pipeline. She has since doubled Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Karen Gillan, Angie Harmon and Peyton List, and coordinated across Cobra Kai, the Jumanji films and Stranger Things.
On what the job actually costs, she is direct: “We are putting our safety, our bodies, our well-being on the line to make things look as real and organic as possible.” She frames coordination as a translation problem — taking a script page and finding the practical action nobody expected. The piece also puts a number on the department's makeup: roughly 22 percent of SAG-AFTRA stunt workers identify as female.
Learn more on IMDb: Stranger Things (2016) · Jahnel Curfman
