Vicky Jewson’s action thriller “Pretty Lethal” opens with five elite ballerinas who can’t stand each other. By the end, they’re covered in blood and finally dancing in sync. Getting there, however, required numb feet and about a month of boot camp in Budapest.
The survival action-thriller, which premiered at SXSW and is now streaming on Prime, follows Bones (Maddie Ziegler), Princess (Lana Condor), Grace (Avantika Vandanapu), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds) and Zoe (Iris Apatow), five elite but deeply dysfunctional dancers stranded at a roadside inn run by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman). When things turn deadly, the women discover that years of grueling ballet training have equipped them with something most people overlook — a lethal physical skill set.
Jewson spent the early stages of development embedded with the Royal Ballet Company in London, interviewing prima ballerinas, filming their rehearsals and asking them about the pain threshold required to do what they do. What she found was not the fragile, decorative image ballet has long projected to the outside world.
“The ballerina is this perfect, fragile, delicate little creature, and sometimes that’s how the world perceives femininity,” Jewson tells Variety. “They undermine our strength, and they undermine our grit, and so I felt like it was a perfect moment to really bust open that stereotype.”
Her research fed directly into the film’s signature fighting style, which Jewson and the cast call “ballet-fu” — a combination of ballet and kung fu. She brought on the stunt team at 87North, whose credits include “Bullet Train” and “The Fall Guy,” with one firm directive: dance first, fight second.
“I wanted to design every fight move from a dance move. We wanted to create elegant grit,” she says. “That’s what ballet-fu is.”
The cast spent close to a month in training before production began in Budapest, working with both stunt coordinators and ballet choreographers simultaneously. Each actress was also paired with a stunt double and a ballet double. The pointe shoes pull double duty in the film — at one point the ballerinas jam a blade into the toe box and wield them as a weapon — but on set, they were just painful.
“I grossly underestimated how painful it would be to wear them all day long,” Condor says. “There were days where I’m like, my feet can’t handle it.” Ziegler adds that the only relief came hours into each day. “The best part is when you hit hour five or six and your feet just go numb. Then you can move through the day.”
As a trained dancer who has not been far from a studio since childhood, Ziegler performed many of her own sequences — including multiple ballet kicks that send the inn’s attackers crashing unconscious to the floor. Condor, who trained at the Joffrey Ballet company as a child before pivoting to acting, also handled a substantial portion of her own work, allowing the camera to go places it otherwise could not.
Avantika, left, and Maddie Ziegler in “Pretty Lethal”
©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collectio
For Ziegler, returning to formal ballet after a stretch of focusing primarily on acting required some recalibration.
“I hadn’t done specifically ballet for a bit,” she says. “I was very nervous. But within the first week, my body just remembers. It’s all my body knows. I’m so grateful it hadn’t left me.”
One of the film’s more distinctive creative choices centers on Simmonds’ character, who is deaf. The actress, herself deaf, pushed early in development to transform a hearing role into a Deaf one. Jewson then researched deaf dancers in the ballet world and built their experience into the film’s sound design, letting audiences slip in and out of Chloe’s perspective during the action sequences. “I wanted to lean into that as a superpower,” Jewson says. “This movie is all about taking perceived weaknesses from a prejudiced world and flipping them on their head.”
For Simmonds, the key to unlocking the character came from her choreographer, who pulled her aside during training and told her to stop following the other dancers. “He said, ‘Millie, find your inner dancer. Stop following the other girls. You don’t need to listen to the music,’” she recalls. All of the training comes to a head in the final bar fight, where the girls tear through a room full of attackers as Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” plays overhead.
Apatow, who plays Chloe’s hearing sister Zoe, learned ASL from scratch for the role. By the end of production, Simmonds was running informal signing tests with the rest of the cast on set during breaks.
Avantika, left, Millicent Simmonds and Iris Apatow in “Pretty Lethal”
©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
The film’s release couldn’t be better timed, arriving just weeks after Timothée Chalamet’s widely condemned comments characterizing ballet as a dying art form that received backlash from the Met Opera to Misty Copeland herself. For the ensemble as a whole, Jewson said the goal was always for the team dynamic to feel genuinely earned — starting the film fractured and stitching itself together through shared survival. Ballerinas, Jewson argues, have spent their entire lives training their bodies to absorb pain, move in perfect sync and perform under pressure. The world just never expected them to use any of that offensively.
Vandanapu says the message she hopes audiences leave with is simpler than any of the action choreography the film required.
“There’s no final girl and everyone teams up at the end,” she says. “I hope young women walk away feeling empowered to embrace harmony and cohesiveness. These are five women shown in an incredibly gritty, empowered, non-sexual light. We don’t get to see female characters like that in action movies, almost ever.”
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