“The 100” star Marie Avgeropoulos is used to being a badass warrior on The CW post-apocalyptic drama, but she had to learn a whole new set of skills for “Tracers,” which opens Friday.
Set in the world of parkour, the film follows a bike messenger, played by Taylor Lautner, who is introduced to the extreme sport by Avgeropoulos’ character. But little does he know that she and her rag tag family don’t just run and jump around for fun, but use the sport to pull off heists.
“I was not familiar with parkour at all,” the actress told TheWrap of her experience with the movie. “They trained us. We had months of training in an actual parkour gym — that exists! I had no idea there were actual establishments that teach you how to be a parkour badass.”
In one memorable sequence from the film, Avgeropoulos, Lautner and the other actors practice parkour all over an old abandoned ship, bouncing off walls and leaping across seemingly impossible chasms, and the actress got to do a lot of her own stunts.
“A lot of it was [me], which was really cool,” she said. “But for insurance purposes at a certain point, they go, ‘whoa.’”
While her character introduces Lautner’s to the world of parkour, in real life it was the other way around.
“In reality, he came out of the womb with like a 50 degree black belt,” Avgeropoulos said of her co-star. “He was already a really good extreme martial artist. So in the parkour gym it was completely the other way around with him being really supportive and showing me how to do the sport.”
“Tracers” is now playing OnDemand and opens in theaters on Friday, March 20.