Whether she’s hanging from a helicopter swinging around downtown Atlanta, or utilizing her gymnastic finesse to defy gravity, Elena Sanchez sure knows how to make an entrance. With stunt work, acting, and producing under her belt, she proves time and again that she’s a force to be reckoned with.
I had the immense pleasure of chatting with Elena recently about her stunt work, getting into producing, and her new film, Bone Face.
Check out the interview below!
Gabrielle Bisaccia: I was checking out your social media and saw that you took a trip to New Orleans. I absolutely love New Orleans with all the history, music, and of course the food! What was the best food you ate while there?
Elena Sanchez: I used to live in New Orleans. I lived there for five to six years. I moved there in 2010 when I was starting in the business and that’s where I first started working. So now, when I get to go back, it’s really nice and very familiar. This time it was for work, which is always a great reason to get to travel. It’s a very interesting city and I love the food, especially oysters. Oysters are my favorite thing to eat there so I would get them all the time. I stayed at The Roosevelt, which is one of the more iconic hotels in New Orleans. It’s sort of like an old school classic hotel. I got to bring my mom with me, since she was visiting, so we had a really great time. She loved New Orleans and loved the hotel, and it was just a really lovely experience!
GB: I also noticed that you seem to be quite the traveler and explorer! What has been the most influential trip you’ve taken so far?
ES: That’s a very hard question! It’s hard to pick one. I was very lucky that my parents had us travel from early on, so we kind of grew up traveling the world. Then as I got older, I just kept going…Obviously when you’re an adult and you have to pay for it, it’s a little different though! There were a few years when I wasn’t able to travel as much, but for the past 10 years, I’ve started traveling more for work. I think one of the coolest trips I got to do was when I went to Cuba for three weeks in 2016. It was before things had opened up again there and I was working on The Fate of the Furious. The opening race sequence takes place in Havana, and I was on the stunt team for that. I got to go because I speak Spanish, and they needed people who could speak and communicate with the local crew. It was while we were there that the first American cruise ship docked in, I don’t even remember how many years, but it had been a long, long time. Things were just starting to open up but that was my first time being in a country where the government and politics really affected people in a way that I had never experienced. In a way, it was also heartbreaking to see, because while we were all amazed by the old cars and the buildings and how timeless, classic, and beautiful it looked, the reality was that they couldn’t get new things to fix their cars, and they couldn’t just order things off of Amazon. Yes, they are really proud of their culture, but it isn’t necessarily by choice. But it was really lovely working there and the locals were so welcoming and so excited for us to be there.
GB: Another thing I saw is that you seem very close with your mom from the heartfelt posts you’ve shared with fans on your social media accounts. I can certainly relate to and appreciate that, being raised by a single mother who I am extremely close with. Was your mom the one who gave you the resilience, confidence, and drive to pursuing acting so wholeheartedly?
ES: Well, I’m very close with both of my parents. It’s just that my mom has been able to visit more in the last few years. My dad has been busy working, but he just finally retired and came to see me for the first time in a few years! It’s funny you say that about my mom because she’s German and Germans are kind of very practical and very serious people. So being an artist is not necessarily something I think that my mom really imagined for me. For the longest time I think she thought it was just a phase. It was more so my dad, who had worked so hard for us our entire lives, who always told us to find something that we really loved. So, that side came more from my dad. I think what came from my mom is the discipline and the stubbornness to be able to pursue something where you’re always getting a door shut in your face. You’re always being told no, and so to keep going, you have to be a little crazy, but you need to have that discipline and that drive. I think that part came a little more from the German side, but definitely both of my parents. Once they saw that it wasn’t just a phase, because time kept going by and I didn’t get a ‘real job’, I think they started to understand that I really loved this and wanted to do it. I was willing to waitress 40 hours a week while trying to pursue this, even though I had a college degree. They just saw that I was serious about it, and it was my ‘thing’, I never had a plan B. I didn’t really tell them right from the beginning what my plans were though, because I think it would have freaked them out, so I kind of eased them into it slowly.
GB: I read that you went to Cornell University to study hotel management and that you became interested in acting after taking an elective. But I’d like to know how did you end up getting so heavily involved in stunt work?
ES: It happened very randomly. I was a gymnast growing up all the way through college, so I was athletic, and I knew how to move and control my body. When I was first starting in drama school, I would be scouring Craigslist for auditions, and the auditions I would get were action related stuff. They were looking for athletes or people who could do specific things, movement wise. Those were the main auditions I was getting because there are a million people who look like me, and I had nothing on my resume, so something had to set me apart to get my foot in the door. And then the first big job I booked was a commercial for a Sony Ericsson cell phone. They wanted an actress who was specifically a gymnast because this commercial that they were filming was very much like the movie Inception, with people floating through the air, and they wanted the shots of this woman where she was doing zero gravity work and floating up and down and then they were going to get shots jumping on a trampoline and doing flips. I went through three rounds of auditions for this, and I booked it, which was a huge deal at the time, it was my first major job. They flew us down to Mexico and it involved a bunch of wire work where you’re wearing a harness and you’re on wires and that’s how you do the zero-gravity floating stuff. I got home from that job, which was an amazing experience, and I was like, ‘I think I just did stunts.’ You hear about stunt work, and while over the last few years it’s become more of a mainstream thing, at the time, I thought stunts were primarily men crashing cars or being set on fire, which, of course, it is that, but there was so much more to it. I started doing some research and I learned that for film, TV, and commercials, there is what’s called a stunt coordinator, and that person hires all the stunt doubles and stunt performers. Luckily, I had these clips from the commercial in Mexico and I put together a little behind the scenes reel of me, floating on the wires and added in some of my gymnastics moves that I had filmed myself in gyms. I started sending that out to stunt coordinators and saying I’m a gymnast and here are some examples of what I can do. I really just hoped that I would start getting hired and eventually I did. I was very lucky that my first job was being on those wires, because usually when you get into stunts, you have to start with stuff like falling down or tripping; you don’t really get to do this super complicated stuff at first. So, I was very lucky that right off the bat, I had this footage of me doing what is considered a specialized complex stunt, and then that led to me getting more of those jobs. My next job after that, which was my first stunt job in a movie, I got to get my head smashed into a mirror in a movie called Trespass with Nicole Kidman and Nicholas Cage.
GB: What’s the craziest stunt you’ve done to date?
ES: The craziest stunt I’ve done would have to be in Spider-Man: Homecoming. This scene actually didn’t make it into the movie, but I was hanging about 20 to 30 feet off a helicopter on a cable, and I was hanging onto ‘Spider-Man’ as we were flying through downtown Atlanta between all the skyscrapers. That one was probably the craziest stunt, and I definitely called my parents before that one and told them I loved them. I didn’t tell them exactly what I was doing then, but I told them after.
GB: Having been in over 100 films and television series, do you have a preference of film or television?
ES: I prefer film. Sometimes it’s hard to really notice the difference now, because a lot of television shows have such a high production value and such intense storylines that they’re almost like mini movies. But I just like film. I like the idea of it being sort of a one-off, individual experience. If you’re lucky, you’re on it for a couple weeks or a couple months. It’s hard if you just go in for a day for a job because you don’t get to know anyone and it’s just a quick in and out. I like the idea that you’re all in this experience together and I also just watch films more than I watch TV. Television is interesting because it’s a well-oiled machine. They’ll shoot each episode in about 7 to 10 days and while they’re filming one episode, they’re already preparing for the next one and sometimes it’s different directors from one episode to the next or even a whole different team.
GB: I also saw that you’ve recently gotten into producing as well. Congratulations! What made you want to pursue producing?
ES: As an actor, they’re always telling you to create your own stuff, because otherwise you’re just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. To have more agency over your own career, you need to create your own stuff. So, I thought, ‘Can I write, direct, or can I produce?’ And out of the three of those, I felt like producing was the one that I would be best at. And that again is probably the German in me, who is very organized and just knows how to make things happen. During 2020 with the first lockdown, while our entire industry shut down for six months, I took a producing course at UCLA, which was offered over Zoom for the first time because of the lockdown. I really learned so much during that course. It was basically like a crash course of producing and they had guest lecturers from studios and executives and also some writers and lawyers and agents. I really learned a lot about what it means to be a producer, and I found out that it can actually be so many different things. You see the word producer and you’re like, well, what do these people actually do? That was the first time I really dug into it and decided that it was something I wanted to and possibly could do. Then it was about a year later that I then got my first producing credit on a Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright movie. From there, I think I’ve been on the producing team for three or four projects. Now, instead of just coming in and saying some lines and leaving, I love being a part of putting the puzzle pieces together and then seeing it emerge from basically just being words on a page all the way to a final product.
GB: You have a new film coming out soon, Bone Face. What can you tell us about the film?
ES: Bone Face is coming out on January 21st, and it starts off as a slasher film and then turns into a murder mystery. Jeremy London plays the sheriff and I’m the deputy. We come across a murder scene and follow some clues, which lead us to a local diner. In this diner there is this eclectic, weird, interesting group of patrons and we quickly realized that one of them has to be the killer, but we don’t know who it is yet. So, most of the film then takes place inside of this diner and it’s really a murder mystery with us trying to figure out who did it. It was so much fun to shoot. We shot it in Mississippi, and it was a reunion of sorts because a lot of my very good friends were a part of it. Ritchie Montgomery, David Kallaway, who I’ve known for over 10 years, then, of course, the producers, Miles Doleac and Lindsay Williams, who I had done two other movies with before. It was a lot of the same crew as well, and it was my third movie with Jeremy. It was just really awesome to get to make this fun movie in Mississippi with some friends.
GB: How did you get involved in this project?
ES: Luckily, I didn’t have to audition for this one, which is every actor’s dream to just get a call to do a movie without having to audition! Miles Doleac, who was a producer on the movie and who I’ve done two movies with in the past, called me and offered me the role. Anything that Miles calls me for, I’m going to say yes, because I love him, and it also happened to work out schedule wise!
GB: Do you think you’d like to stay in the action and horror genres? Or is there another genre you’d like to tackle?
ES: I would love to do a romantic comedy! The horror has become a result of doing action movies, because there’s also a lot of stunts in horror movies usually. Some of the first stuff I did was action and horror, so that’s what I seem to get calls for. But that being said, the beginning of Bone Face is a bit of a horror movie, but I wouldn’t classify the whole thing as a horror movie. It is very dramatic and it’s a bit of a thriller. It was fun to get to play something which had a little more depth to it, which didn’t just seem kind of like a gratuitous horror movie. But my poor mom doesn’t like horror, doesn’t watch action, and doesn’t want to see me get ‘killed’, which seems to happen in a lot of movies I’m in! She asks when I’m going to do a romantic comedy, like a Hallmark movie, or a Lifetime movie. So, I’m trying to get out there, maybe do something else, but it hasn’t happened yet.
GB: What’s next for you?
ES: After Bone Face, Captain America: Brave New World comes out in February, which I can’t really talk much about, but I was on the stunt team for that, so that should be a fun one to watch in theaters! Right now, I’m on location for a film, which I sadly also can’t talk about yet, but I am very excited about this one. It’s also a thriller and I’m sure there will be some announcements about this one very soon. I’m just very excited to have one last job right before the holidays; I was actually packing my suitcase to go home for the holidays and then I got this call. It happened super last minute, and I’ve been here for a couple weeks now, and tomorrow is my last day.
