‘I was a ballet dancer in Russia and had been in the theatre since I was eight,’ says Olga. ‘I studied at the Mussorgsky College of Music and Art in St Petersburg and obtained a BA in Performing Arts. After getting my degree I went to work in a play in Tokyo. Peter, who was a rugby international, was over there, too.
It was by chance that they met and, after living in Japan for some years and having two children, they moved to Australia, settling on the Central Coast.
‘We met 20 years ago,’ says Olga, now 40, who lives in Narara with Peter, ‘he’s my rock’, and their children Dmitriy and Anastasia.
In Australia, Olga was introduced to an acting agent who got her a job in the movies. ‘It was a small part on Great Gatsby.’ She is credited in the picture as ‘Russian silent film actress’.
Olga was then hired as an interpreter for Russian actress Svetlana Khodchenkova for the filming of Wolverine. The movie starred Hugh Jackman, whom Olga declares is by far her favourite actor.
While working on film sets she was attracted to the films’ stunt performers, ‘a talented group who looked after each other’.
During Wolverine she met stunt coordinator, Tony Lynch, who fuelled her fascination for this aspect of filmmaking. Twelve years later she continues to work and train with him, while keeping herself in peak condition.
Her debut as a stunt woman was on a Network Ten series Wonderland. ‘I was pushed off a chair onto the concrete floor,’ she recalls. ‘I was wearing a pair of kneepads, which viewers couldn’t see.’
Over time she progressed to more complex ‘gags’, as they are called in the business. She was assistant stunt coordinator on the third series of ‘Mr Inbetween’ and recently, on George Miller’s dystopian feature, Furiosa, she doubled for Anya Taylor-Joy during rehearsals and for part of the filming. She was also a member of the stunt rigging team.
Stuntbook lists Olga’s doubles as including Robin Nevin, Nicole Kidman, Asher Keddie and Mia Wasikowska, and she is often called in as a stunt or precision driver as well as performing athletic stunts. One sequence in Furiosa called for the main character, doubled by Olga, to climb underneath a truck and come through a hatch at the front. ‘I was wearing a harness attached to three riggers,’ she explains. ‘It wasn’t a spectacular scene but at times I had to defy gravity. It required constant communication and many people thought it couldn’t be done – it was a great team effort.’
What certainly is spectacular is fire, which Olga just loves working with. ‘I trained for years to understand how to safely operate with something that’s potentially catastrophic.’ Several years ago she starred in a short documentary From Russia with Punch where she is engulfed in flames in the finale.
‘When you’re fully ignited, you know, it gets pretty hot pretty quickly!’
Olga Miller
She describes stuntwork as ‘doing something crazy, making it as safe as possible and making it repeatable’.
‘It’s the pinnacle of physical storytelling – and I’m in it for the long run.’
Stunt Rigging is the art of making people fly through the air, skid on the ground, float in space, get smashed into things without harm, and display superhuman strength. It allows the safe execution of dynamic movement that appears dangerous, impossible, or even like magic.
