Zoë J. Bell (born November 17, 1978) is a New Zealand stuntwoman and actress.
Bell was born in New Zealand, the oldest child of Tish and Andrew Bell. She has a brother, Jake. She participated in competitive gymnastics. At fifteen she quit gymnastics to study tae kwon do. Bell attended Auckland Girls' Grammar School and Selwyn College.
Bell began her career in 1998 when her father treated a stunt man for a head injury and came home with a phone number for her to call. Bell got the job working as a stunt double for Lucy Lawless on Xena: Warrior Princess. She fractured vertebrae in her back doing wire work on the show. Bell continued working for a week until another stunt in which a breakaway chair was smashed on her back, incapacitating her. The years following she did a number of small films and tv stunt work, including stunt coordinating a short film with Adrienne Wilkinson, with whom she had previously worked on Xena. She then went on to double Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Initially hired as Thurman's "crash and smash" double, the stunt team realized Bell would also make an ideal double for fight scenes and was trained accordingly. Bell had to learn to fight in the wushu style; this required her to consciously stop mimicking the physical mannerisms of Lucy Lawless. Near the end of filming for Kill Bill: Volume 2, she injured her ribs and the ligaments in her wrist while simulating being thrown backwards by a shotgun blast. Bell required surgery and spent several months recuperating. After production wrapped on Kill Bill, she received "The Bells" sign which hung outside of Vernita Green's house. She later gave it to her parents.
Tarantino was impressed with her and cast her in a leading role in his next film Grindhouse, in which she plays herself and performs her own stunts, the most notable of which occur on the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger. She also did stunt work for the movie Catwoman, doing high falls and doubling Sharon Stone.
The documentary Double Dare was released in 2004, focusing on Zoë Bell and fellow stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, following them as they attempted to succeed in Hollywood. The filming of Double Dare covered Zoë's career from the end of Xena to the beginning of her work on Kill Bill: Volume 1. In 2004, Bell and Angela Meryl (Vivica A. Fox's stunt double) were nominated at the Taurus World Stunt Awards in the categories "Best Overall Stunt by a Woman" and "Best Fight" for their doubling of the knife fight between Beatrix Kiddo and Vernita Green in Kill Bill 1.
In 2005, Bell was nominated for a Taurus in the categories "Best Overall Stunt by a Woman," "Best Fight," and "Best High Work." She and Daryl Hannah's double won Best Overall Stunt and Best Fight for their fight in Budd's trailer in Kill Bill 2. Her Best High Work nomination was for a fall of over 200 feet in the film Catwoman.
