Five-time Olympian Luuka Jones-Yaxley, pictured with director of photography/cinematographer Lawrence Sher (left) and film director Baltasar Kormákur, was a stunt double for Charlize Theron in whitewater kayaking scenes in the Netflix film Apex.
By Dana Johannsen of RNZ
For the first time in two decades, Olympic paddler Luuka Jones-Yaxley was still.
One moment she was dropping into her final run at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium at the Paris Olympics, finishing fifth in the kayak cross. Next, the five-time Olympian was staring down something far less familiar – “civilian life”.
No start line looming. No rapids to read. No pinnacle events shaping her days. Just the quiet uncertainty that follows the end of an elite sporting career.
“I finished Paris and went into more of an administration role, and it was a really difficult transition,” she says.
“I think every athlete finds it tough and confronting to go from having your life focused on training and competing and the next big event, and then it’s like, ‘what’s next?’”
The answer, when it came, was unexpected – and cinematic.
Weeks after stepping away from the sport, Jones-Yaxley was asked to double for Charlize Theron in the whitewater kayaking scenes in the action movie Apex, which was released on Netflix on Friday.
The message arrived out of the blue in November 2024, just as the Olympic silver medallist was preparing to marry her partner Brenden Yaxley. A friend working in safety co-ordination on film sets wanted to know if she’d be interested in being a stunt double. Jones-Yaxley readily agreed, but she wasn’t convinced it was actually going to come off.
“It was one of those texts where you’re thinking, ‘this is probably not going to happen’.”
It wasn’t until weeks later, as she was being helicoptered into a remote river on the South Island’s West Coast, that it sank in “this is actually happening”.
For an athlete navigating the loss of structure and identity that comes with retirement, the timing could not have been better.
“To get this opportunity and to do something that felt exciting and didn’t feel like work, and had elements of having to perform and learning new things, it was right up my alley,” she says.
“It wasn’t something that I ever saw coming, but it has definitely helped give me something to focus on, and reinforce that life goes on after sport. And actually, if I was still training fulltime, I would never have been able to take up this opportunity.”
While much of the film was shot in and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, some of the whitewater scenes were filmed on rivers around Hokitika, Haast and Wānaka – the kind of wild, technical rivers Jones-Yaxley had spent a lifetime mastering.
Over 10 days in January 2025, she and fellow Kiwi paddler River Mutton, an extreme kayaking specialist, worked through a series of demanding river sequences. The shoot later shifted to Australia, where filming continued on location and at Penrith Whitewater Stadium – a venue Jones-Yaxley had returned to year after year across her career.
“I think I must have competed there every year for about 20 years,” she says.
While a movie set is a world away from competitive canoe slalom, the demands were strangely familiar: precision, courage and performance under pressure.
Jones-Yaxley is careful not to give too much away, but the film’s promotional material describes the story as “a grieving woman who seeks solace in the wilderness, only to become ensnared in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a serial killer”.
“There was still an acting component, so it was kind of interesting to apply some things that I’d learned from sport performance into the movie world,” she says.
“Like in a chase scene, you’d have to paddle and act like you’re being chased by somebody. So your nice kayaking technique goes out the window and you’re kind of trying to put yourself in the space where you’re genuinely trying to paddle for your life and that looks a lot different to doing a really nice slalom run or paddling down a river normally.”
Working alongside Theron added to the experience. With the stunt work, the Kiwi paddler provided the Hollywood actor with guidance and advice on how to deal with sections of whitewater.
Theron performed many of her own action scenes in the film, including scaling rock faces without ropes, and much of the publicity around Apex has focused on the physical demands of the role and her hands-on approach to the action.
But Theron has been equally clear about the role of the stunt team behind the scenes.
“When people say, ‘she does all her stunts’, I’m like, there’s an incredible group of people I’m so dependent on, and I couldn’t have this performance without them. I’ve landed on: I do action, they do stunts,” Theron said in official Netflix publicity material.
“Anything you see of me going down a waterfall or some of the really dangerous rapids in nature, where we didn’t know if there was a rock underneath, I had two incredible women, River Mutton and Luuka Jones, doing that for me.
“We had world-class, Olympic level kayakers doing a lot of my kayaking. I thought I’d be great at kayaking because I’m so comfortable in the water and I’m a very strong swimmer, but I really struggled with the kayaking, so I was very grateful to them.”
Jones-Yaxley describes Theron as “badass”.
“There was a bit of coaching in terms of the whitewater side of things, and I was super impressed.
“You know, she’d come off a huge stint of climbing in the Blue Mountains and her fingers are raw and then she’s kind of just straight into kayaking on the white water, which is notoriously difficult for anybody.
“She wanted to get things right and wanted to look like a legitimate kayaker, she can watch someone and just kind of emulate their style and technique and it was really interesting to observe. And just really down to earth and was just kind of a perfectionist and a performer.”
If the work carried echoes of elite sport, the conditions did not.
Jones-Yaxley, who spent much of her career operating on tight high-performance budgets, found herself in a very different environment.
“I’ve never had a hot tent on the side of the river,” she says. “It felt pretty bougie, we were well looked after.”
Proof, perhaps, that life after sport can take unexpected turns – and sometimes, it even comes with an IMDb credit.
- RNZ