When Apple TV’s Palm Royale’s script called for a “Dynasty-style fight,” stunt coordinator Mallory Thompson and fight coordinator Josh Fried took it as an invitation to lean into big dramedy.
The result was a three-minute brawl between Maxine (Kristen Wiig) and Raquel (Claudia Ferri) in Season 2, episode 6, titled “Maxine Finds Herself.” After Raquel pulls a gun on Maxine, the fight tears through the house, with the women crashing into furniture, throwing objects, tumbling down the stairs and eventually ending up in the pool.
The episode earned Emmy recognition for Thompson, who was nominated for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming, as well as for stunt performers Colby Lemmo and Sonja Wajih, who received a nod for Outstanding Stunt Performance. Their nominations marked the first time an all-women stunt team from a single series had been recognized in both categories in the same year.
The team began by studying the over-the-top fights from Dynasty and brainstorming how far they could push the sequence.
“We did a bunch of research and watched all these Dynasty fights, and then came up with all of the craziest ideas,” Thompson said. Working with Fried, she developed increasingly elaborate beats, including sliding one performer across a bar and crashing a frame over her head.
“I brought them to the showrunner and to the director, Stephanie Laing, and Abe Sylvia, our showrunner, and they said yes to everything,” Thompson said. “We just kept coming up with more and more obnoxious things to play with.”
The stunt team then shot previs with Lemmo and Wajih, mapping out the fight before bringing it to the actual set.
“The script was pretty vague in the Dynasty-inspired fight that we were creating here,” Lemmo said. “It’s not until the day that you get into the space and that you’re in the actual set that you see what’s possible.”
That meant solving plenty of unexpected problems. A canvas that was supposed to break over Wajih’s head had to be scored multiple ways after it bounced off her instead. A heavy candelabra and a six-foot roll of leopard tapestry became part of another sequence.
“We broke a candelabra,” Lemmo said with a laugh.
The performers also had to execute stair falls and crash into a wooden table that, despite being designed to break apart, was still “solid wood,” Wajih said.
“With us in this career, we prepare for it every day,” she said. “It’s years of training, months of physical training that prep you for your workday.”
Matching Wiig and Ferri was another crucial part of the process. The doubles watched the actresses’ takes to capture their physicality, while the actresses watched the stunt performers.
“They brought such a unique physicality to their own characters that it was important for us to watch their takes,” Wajih said.
For Thompson, the opportunity to build such an extended female-on-female fight was especially rewarding.
“Getting to do the things, like a three-minute-long female-on-female Dynasty-style fight, is so different than the normal stunts that we get called for,” she said. “It was just such a fun thing to plan and execute together with an amazing cast and crew.”
The Emmy recognition added another layer to the experience. The team didn’t initially realize its nominations were making history.
“It’s something that we didn’t realize when we were nominated, that that was what was happening,” Lemmo said. “That history was being made in a way.”
Thompson credited the women who paved the way, including Emmy-winning stunt coordinator Shauna Duggins.
“There have been so many amazing women who’ve come before us and who’ve paved the way,” she said. “We’re following in their footsteps, humbly.”
To learn more behind other fun stunt sequences featured in Palm Royale, watch the video above.
