UK — Ayesha Hussain Built a Bullwhip-and-Blades Career First, Then a Coordinator Called About the Sword Work

• Ayesha Hussain is a London stunt performer with credits on “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Gladiator II.”
• A stunt coordinator found her online and hired her because she could handle a sword.
• She spent this year on large-scale stunts for a DC film that is not out until 2028.

Posted: October 20, 2026

Hussain came into the department sideways, which is the part worth reading. She was scouted as a model at 19, saw fire breathers and acrobats working corporate parties in Europe, and trained as a fire breather herself. At 22 she was touring with a high-end circus troupe, and the skills she kept adding were marksmanship skills — precision bullwhip cracking and knife throwing became the bulk of her live-performance career. Sword work came later and deliberately: she says her mother’s side of the family has Rajput roots, and she trained in sword combat to honour that.

The call that turned it into screen work came off Instagram. A stunt coordinator reached out saying they needed someone with her heritage who was good with swords — which is the practical reason a performer with a specific look and a specific weapon skill gets booked, and the reason she says she had never thought of stunt work as a job available to her. “Only over the last decade diversity in films has grown enough to require stunt performers of colour to this degree,” she says. Credits since include Doctor Who and The Wheel of Time, plus a Harry Styles video, and in 2025 she picked up two Actor Award nominations in the Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture category.

The skill list has kept widening the way a working performer’s has to: scuba dive master, rock climber, boxing, kickboxing, jiujitsu and trick riding, including Roman riding and wire work rehearsed on her own horse at a London yard. Her most recent job — shot this year, under wraps until a 2028 release — is large-scale stunt work on a DC blockbuster, which she describes only as high-octane car chases and scenes carrying more than 500 extras.

Alongside the performing she co-founded Babes With Blades with the Malaysian-British filmmaker Jade Ang Jackman, a film collective aimed at visibility for women of colour in action cinema; the name is a jab at how thinly those parts are usually written. It has brought work with Nike, Levi’s, the British Film Institute and the London Short Film Festival.

Source: Vogue Arabia — Ayesha Hussain: The Arab-Indian Stuntwoman Redefining Action in Hollywood

Learn more on IMDb: Ayesha Hussain