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

"It's not anybody
who can go find a
building they can
jump off of."
Along with the number of stunts performed day in and day out, you would imagine that somewhere along the line you’d have to develop a specialty. Mike agrees, "Absolutely. This is not saying that anyone is better than anyone else. But some people’s specialties are high falls, some specialties are fights. A good example is when I jump out the window with Faith. The high fall was actually Jennifer Badger and myself, it wasn’t Karen Sheperd. So we actually had two doubles there that night, because Jennifer is a really good high-fall person. Jennifer actually works on (Angel) all the time, she doubles Charisma, and she’s really talented too."en ctually you may not know it, but Jennifer played the roll of Vanessa in the episode of Blind Date. "But Karen Sheperd was established as Faith’s double and she’s a wicked, wicked martial artist!" Mike continues, "So sometimes you’ll see people, it doesn’t mean that they’re any different or they’re lacking ability, like doing falls. Some people like doing fire burns, some people don’t. A lot of times it’s what you have a chance to rehearse. It’s not anybody who can go find a building they can jump off of. Or find somebody that’s got an airbag that will let you practice. You know it’s dangerous just practicing. If you don’t have the opportunity then it’s hard to skill yourself in that area."

And what would Mike consider his specialty? "I would like to say I have multiple specialties. (laugh) I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was four, so motorcycles are definitely one of my specialties. I’ve been driving boats since I was like six. I really had a great little bonus start there. Boats are one of my specialties, fire. I did a stunt boat show for five years. I can spin a boat on a dime, anywhere you want it I can put it. Only four of us were at the time allowed to even jump the boats through fire and I was one of the four. Water stuff. I do freestyle on jet-skis, handstands, headstands. I’m a Master scuba diver so anything that’s like on the water I love to do, which I hardly get to do out here. Also, I like air-rams, I’m really good on air-rams and I like high falls. But I used to be a one-meter board diver so it helped." So you’d think in the episode In The Dark where Angel

Did you say fire? We'll give you some fire!
fought the sadistic vampire Marcus and dove off the pier into the water Mike was in his glory. But to his frustration, he was in New York finishing work on a movie with Ed Burns (whom he doubles) and Robert DeNiro entitled 15 Minutes. "... yeah, and that was such a great gag too. But Chad Stahelski did that. I was laughing because it like one of the big gags that Angel got to do and I’m like, ‘you know I can’t believe I gotta turn this down.’ But I just had to."

When it come to the quality of action on Angel compared to other shows, excluding Buffy of course, Mike attests that it is top notch if not better than most! "There’s nobody else out there that can really touch us with action." We asked him what his favorite stunt of this past season was and he had a hard time deciding. But he offered this one, only to change it later as you will see. "Probably the air-ram on the episode, (Lonely Hearts). It was one of those things where I had just started working on the show and I was talking to the coordinator and the director and we wanted to make sure this show looks good. I mean, we’ve got some serious action going on and they gave me the opportunity. ‘Well, you can go fly across this room and land your head up and just slam the wall and slide down to your feet or you can go inverted and slam it upside down and crash your head.’ I sat there and looked at it and I just opted, ‘well let’s do the big gnarly looking, upside-down one.’ And the reason I like it so much is because it really knocked the heck out of me. (laugh) It was 900 pounds of thrust on the air-ram. I had to hit the corner just right. If I was off, if I hit dead center of the corner with my shoulders spread it could have broken a collarbone. I had to hit it sideways, my back flat to the wall and kind of skip into it, but it just pile drove me right to the ground." Mike continues, "It was just one of my many favorites to remember because the director came out there, Jim Contner and he was just ecstatic. He thought that was the best stunt he’d ever seen. He was jumping up and down. Everybody was checking me out. I was fine, but it looked so gnarly and so scary and he was just the happiest guy in the world. He was hugging me, everybody was excited, it was a lot of fun." It takes a special person to get shot across a room by
"We had it going
so fast, I mean if
you blinked for a
second he would
hit ya!"
900 pounds of pressure, slam into a wall and come up saying ‘that was fun!’ "I was a little dazed at first but I’ll tell ya, I broke the lamp and everything with my legs when I came down and I busted a table. Landed right on my head upside down, it was fun. I mean it was scary but it was fun."

There have been days on the set that have lasted up to 17 hours, especially when shooting on a sound stage. And some of these grueling shoots involve long flowing sequences of choreographed fights such as was done for The Ring. "That sequence was so long," Mike begins, "the script said to build a fight from scratch. Basically warming up with (the demon) not even touching (Angel) to getting harder, more and more in depth until finally Angel has to start fighting his way back just to stay alive. So we build up this whole fight, slowly, slowly and when we saw the final product there was stuff from the end of the fight at the beginning and vice versa. I mean it didn’t flow like we built it, but we shot a master two or three times. That fight sequence had over 51 moves and it was hard enough to remember. I was fighting Clay Barber, he’s a ex-US Olympic member of the Tae Kwon Do team. We had it going so fast, I mean if you blinked for a second he would hit ya! He is so fast, he’s just a blur but he’s great to work with because we can actually compliment each other very well on our speed.

Sophia and Karen get a little direction from
Joss Whedon on the set of Buffy.
We did so much fighting in there you could make a two hour movie off it. You had feature quality stuff in there. That was a huge day for me because we did something close to 45 or 50 setups film wise. It was all second-unit, that one and actually the one I did with Karen Sheperd. We built the fight with Sophia Crawford, while Karen was out of town and then Karen came and did it. That one was like 45 moves total, the one in the apartment before we even went outside, but we shot the outside part on a different day."

Mike seems to have a bit of the daredevil in him so it was only natural to suspect that he’s drawn to the more adventurous stunts and that it would be a bit more ‘fun’ in his mind. "It is, it is because I love flying into the air. I don’t do it enough. Sometimes you can fight, I’m talking anywhere from 8-12 hours a day, 3-5 days a week. You’re doing big, big fights all the time and let me tell you, they wear you down, they wear you out. Sometimes I get so excited if I know I’m just flying across a table or just doing a high fall. I’m just like the happiest kid on earth. It’s a different kind of mental focus. When I come in for a fight it’s a whole one-way ball game because I’ve got to focus on all these moves and timing. I’ve got to fight and keep my head turned as much as possible so I don’t get seen by the camera, so that’s a big mental stress. But there’s been a day where I got thrown out of two windows and I got to fall off this mockup of a building. You’ve got your lineup, you know where you need to go to. You’ve got your ‘mark’, your ‘end mark’ and that’s it. You don’t have 50 moves. It’s like so much fun, I can’t wait!"