Featuring...
Mike Massa
Stunt Double for "Angel" played by David Boreanaz

Mike Massa: the face of Angel
you don't see.
Every week there is one guy who gets up in the morning and smiles as he gets ready for work. He’s got a long 10 to 14 hour day ahead of him on the set. He’ll have to run through his marks several times, go to wardrobe, make-up, don his black pants, boots and that ever female-swoon-inducing black leather trench coat. Ah, "David Boreanaz?" you ask. Not exactly, because this guy will also get jettisoned across a room, crash through a wall, get into numerous martial arts fights and the oddest thing is... he’s still smiling! Mike Massa, stunt double for the talented man behind Angel is a an amazing talent in his own right and he really loves his work! But after an awesome first season this man deserved a little break over hiatus don’t you think? "Yeah, I went to Hawaii for a month on a movie though, 'Pearl Harbor'," Mike begins, "I think they're going to try and release it next Memorial Day. I doubled Ben Afleck for two days and then I doubled Josh Hamilton, I think he's George Hamilton's son, for the rest of the month on and off.Then I played about, I guess, 20 different sailors and people that got killed jumping off
"I used to ride free-style bicycles in the parades, jump ramps and water ski as Goofy."
of boats and blown up by planes. They had us running in our skivvies, they had us running in khakis, they had us running in Navy whites getting blown off docks, I mean a little bit of everything. And my whole priority was if I got on that movie was try to get Hawaii. I did, and now all the people are down suffering in Mexico." (laugh)

You can take the boy out of the stunt but you can’t take the stunt, well you know. So let’s see how this boy of 32 actually got the stunt in him! "I got in through live shows actually, working at Theme Parks. I used to work at Disney before that. So I was in entertainment doing live shows for like 10 years and some of my jobs were stunt related. Then basically I realized 'wow, this stuff's kind of fun'. I auditioned for a stunt boat show at Universal Studios back in 1990 and did that for like 5 years. I was a trick water-skier, freestyler on bicycles. People from LA came out and told us about the business and it just got me hooked even more. So I just kept on chasing it and then everything starting falling into place. Universal opened up a couple sound stages, a couple TV shows came there and I just ran with it from there," he recalls.

In a typical day, Mike can run through a number of different stunt gags and he explains which are most common on Angel and how they’re used. "Oh well, where to start. Let’s see, there’s so many! (laugh) An Air-Ram is very basic in its own sense that you pull the actual machine out." (a small platform which launches its victim via compressed air) "Hopefully you’ve had a prior practice to warm up once or twice on it to get the proper poundage before you hit something. Then basically you lay it in there, you choreograph it into the move. Then you try to overlap two pieces if you can, like running around a corner and hitting the ram. The (rigger) will set it up, make sure it’s hot and you ru

Kevin Foster, ‘Marc Blucus’ (Riley) stunt double being ratcheted.
n in, do the motion, hit it and fly into a wall, a person, which ever it is." Sounds like fun but tricky as Mike explains, "We try to keep it where the set up's not too different. The last thing a director wants to do is go out of his way for a shot. So what we’ll do is choreograph a fight, say we’ll put a Ratchet in it. We’ll have the guys in there earlier to set the cable up," (a wire that, when released, will retract or pull at high speeds) "and we’ll have the fight go across those lines to where it’s a real simple set up and will be one shot."

Mike gives us an example where a ratchet gag was used in the episode Five by Five with Eliza Dushku’s (Faith) stunt double Karen Sheperd. He recounts the scene, "I got kicked in the side and I did a full twisting side flip over the couch and then I got ratcheted into the ceiling. I throw her into a wall and she falls down, I grab her and we ratchet her across the floor. Those are all ratchets. We go through the fight and when it gets close to (the gag), one of us will slip away and put a harness on. Takes about 5 minutes to rig, hook yourself up, and you rehearse that move. We’ll already have the poundage dialed in, we’ll have our special effects guy there, our stunt rigger, he’ll have his finger on the button. Karen will jump over the couch, grab a hold of me. We’ll rehearse it to a timer and then boom, we’ll shoot it. Hopefully as fast as we can and then we move right back on with the rest of the fight so that nothing gets slowed down. That’s how we keep the gags that we have on Angel, we do ratchets and air-rams all the time. We don’t do very many floating wire-gags at all." (as used in the episode Hush on Buffy — the floating Gentlemen) "A ratchet is a wire-gag but not a floating, flipping, twisting type thing."