Palm Royale's All-Women Stunt Team Made Emmy History With a Three-Minute Brawl

• Stunt coordinator Mallory Thompson and performers Colby Lemmo and Sonja Wajih are Emmy-nominated for a Palm Royale fight.
• The fight runs close to three minutes and moves through the whole mansion and into the pool.
• The team shot about 60 storyboarded setups over four days after weeks of previs and rehearsal.

Posted: August 18, 2026

Stunt coordinator Mallory Thompson and performers Colby Lemmo and Sonja Wajih are Emmy-nominated for the fight in Palm Royale season two's “Maxine Finds Herself” — the first time since the stunt-performance category was created in 2021 that an all-women team from the same series has landed nominations in both coordination and performance.

The sequence is an outlier on schedule alone. Where a television fight typically runs 10 to 20 seconds, this one runs close to three minutes and travels the whole Dellacorte mansion — bar, living room, staircase, lawn and finally the pool. Thompson built it around what she calls a “hyper-femme catfight” grammar borrowed from 1980s Dynasty, with fight coordinator Josh Fried, and the script gave her almost nothing to start from: the page read “Dynasty fight ensues.”

The prep is the story for coordinators. Weeks of planning, previs and rehearsal fed roughly 60 storyboarded setups, shot across four days with different actor-and-double pairings scheduled around Kristen Wiig's availability — and Thompson notes they got every one of them. The performers worked in period wardrobe throughout: bouffants, acrylic nails, heels and vintage gowns, fighting with portraits, candelabras and bolts of fabric as props. The pool finish was taken in a single take as the daylight ran out.

Sources: TheWrap — How the Palm Royale Stunt Team Honed a ‘Hyper-Femme Catfight’ for the Show's Longest Brawl Ever · Variety — How Palm Royale's All-Women Stunt Team Pulled Off That Catfight Sequence

Learn more on IMDb: Palm Royale (2024) · Mallory Thompson · Colby Lemmo · Sonja Wajih