Victoria Pratt on Mutant X

Victoria Pratt, who plays Shalimar Fox on TV’s Mutant X previewed one of the last episodes of the season, which finds her in some hairy predicaments. “In the last episode we shot, which isn’t necessarily the last one that will air, Shalimar goes undercover in a circus,” Pratt said. “I actually got to train with the circus and we’re trying to figure out what routine I could do, because it’s not like I had tons of lead time to be able to train and stuff. So we came up with this cool bungee trapeze routine. I was doing cherry drops off of a trapeze at 40 feet. It’s just cool stuff, like the closest you can come to flying really. It’s just so amazing. I don’t know necessarily how dangerous it was but I think it would’ve turned a lot of people’s stomachs.”

With the daily grind of a weekly TV series, Pratt didn’t have months and months to train like the actors on feature films who go through specialized boot camps for each project. She had to work her training into her tight schedule. “We set up a big bungee apparatus in the studio that I could pop in on my lunch hours and stuff like that. I went to the different facilities around town with the circus trainers. I don’t know how much time I actually got to put in on it, but I loved it. So whenever I could, it was something I really wanted to do.”

Pratt is of course experiences with wirework from the show’s many fight scenes, but she said the circus work was completely different. “The wirework for fight scenes is a lot more almost violent. The bungee is so soft and you have to work the bungee yourself too. So it’s a workout too. The harness, they’re just picking you up and flinging you around. You have to work to keep your body where it’s supposed to be in space, but you’ve got riggers yanking you and moving you. With the bungee, it’s you. And it’s just the coolest thing. You control the movements that you do, like in the air when you’re throwing semis and back layouts and doubles. It’s your momentum and your balance that make you do the trick. When you’re doing wirework for stunts, there are a lot of other people that come into play.”

Mutant X airs in syndication.

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