She played a significant part in one of the most talked-about shows of the year, but you probably didn’t see her. Most of the time, body double and stuntwoman Jénel Stevens, who trained the cast of The Woman King and choreographed many of its amazing fight scenes, prides herself in her ability to go unnoticed, as she mostly does in the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. As the double for the show’s supervillain Titania (played by Jameela Jamil), Stevens spent most of her time training actors, kicking people in the face and doing flips off other people’s bodies, but this experience marked a bit of an evolution for her too.

“When I doubled for [Jameela], I was doing the action, but I still had to play the character, get her mannerisms, be a girly girl but still be a badass. So it was a very different role I hadn't really played before.”

An expert in an array of fighting styles and martial arts, Stevens has previously worked on a number of Marvel titles, among them Black Panther, The Avengers, and Luke Cage, in addition to Black Lightning on The CW, Run the World (Prime Video), Pose on FX, plus scores of more shows and movies. She-Hulk stretched her out of her comfort zone some.

“Some of the moves had to be more like, flippy kinds of situation,” she says via video chat from a hotel room in Toronto, where she’s working on another huge, top-secret action flick. “One, in particular, I had to basically do a cartwheel on somebody. That was something I had never done before. I came to the set late, so I had to work to get caught up. But one of the really good things about stunt performing is learning new tricks and trades.”

Stevens has an ever-growing job (sis stays booked and busy) in an ever-growing industry that’s trying to quickly catch up to the times. Black stuntwomen remain a small percentage of doubles overall (Stevens guesstimates there are about 30-50 Black women compared to hundreds of white peers) and the work is fraught with a complicated, shady history. It used to be common practice for male performers to do stuntwork in wigs as opposed to hiring women. And it won’t surprise you to know that Black performers were excluded from stunt work for a long time, too; up until the mid-1960s, producers would literally paint white people instead of hiring Black professionals. Stevens is part of a new wave, carrying the torch passed from Black stunt pioneers like Jadie David, who doubled for Pam Grier in the 1970s. Though there’s more visibility and opportunity than ever, colorism is still real and it’s still common practice for stunt performers to be painted a shade darker than they are in order to match the actor. “Wigging and paint-downs should really be a thing of the past,” she says.

While it’s dope that more doors are opening for Black people in Hollywood, we also come in a wide range of variations in skin tone, which raises ethical questions. “There's always the conversation, ‘Can we make her shades darker to match this other actor?’ It's a sensitive topic nowadays, but it needs to be talked about. Everybody needs to not be afraid of the conversation, and just make sure that everybody's comfortable.”

Proud to be part of a growing community, Stevens is also looking to keep growing out of her comfort zone, and that means going from a hidden figure to a visible badass, taking up more space on screen. In addition to doubling for Jamil in She-Hulk, Stevens had a blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment with some other doubles playing security guards and got to run lines with Jamil and lead Tatiana Maslany, which is leading to more speaking parts––like the one in that top-secret movie she’s in Toronto for. “I'm very proud [of the work] and I feel a sense of responsibility to help train up women. But also looking up to my mentors as well. Some want to retire but feel like they can’t because they feel they have a responsibility to train up. There's a lot of women coming up in the ranks. And I'm very excited about that.”