“Palm Royale” made Emmy history as accolades for the Apple TV dramedy’s stunt coordinator, Mallory Thompson, and stunt performers, Colby Lemmo and Sonja Wajih, marked the first time since the stunt-performers category was introduced in 2021 that an all-women stunt team was nominated for both coordination and performance.
“We were all in disbelief and shock at first and then the tears came,” said Wajih, who was on a group FaceTime with Thompson and Lemmo as the nods were unveiled. “The only other woman nominated in my category, she’s the only woman who’s won an Emmy,” Thompson said of “Beef” stunt coordinator Shauna Duggins.
Leaning into the extremes of feminine energy became Thompson’s super-power as she choreographed the fight between Raquel (Claudia Ferri) and Mirabelle, the long-lost twin of Kristen Wiig’s Maxine, in the Season 2 episode “Maxine Finds Herself.” Lemmo and Wajih earned their nods for doubling for Wiig and Ferri, respectively, in the episode.
With the script simply stating “A ‘Dynasty’-style fight ensues,” Thompson embraced the “hyper-femme catfight mentality” of the ’80s staple as well as the extensive use of props, stairs and even a pool for the brawl, which extended across the entirety of the Dellacorte mansion for the series’ longest fight scene.
“We kept coming up with these crazy ideas, and they just said ‘yes’ to everything,” Thompson recalled of her conversations with showrunner Abe Sylvia and director Stephanie Laing. Typical TV fights, she noted, last 10 to 20 seconds, while this sequence went on for nearly three minutes. “They were like, ‘Nope, just go ‘Dynasty,’ just keep going.’”
The biggest challenge, Thompson said, was the sheer magnitude of the fight. The work took weeks of planning, rehearsals and pre-vis before a four-day
shoot that featured different pairings of actors and their doubles, all filmed
around Wiig’s schedule. It took place in various locations, some of which were
affected by the Los Angeles fires of 2025. Storyboards kept track of everything,
with Thompson noting, “I think we had something like 60 different setups on
our boards, and we got every one of them.”
That included taking the fight into the pool, which was shot as production
was losing daylight and could only be done in one take.
“It’s definitely a lot of pressure, but I feel like that’s something that we thrive off of as stuntwomen,” Wajih said. “All of a sudden, you get quiet right before the take, and your innate feeling and intuition take over. All the prep settles in, and then you just run with it.”
Part of the stunt team’s prep involved studying the actors’ interpretations of
their characters. Although Lemmo doubled for Wiig as Maxine throughout the
series, Mirabelle was new and had none of Maxine’s yearning for high society
or ladylike behavior. “Getting to watch Kristen create this whole new character
and put a different spin on it was amazing,” Lemmo said. “And then to go in
and replicate that when it came to the action, it was honestly the most fun I’ve
had on a fight that I can recall.”
The brawl required a fair amount of technical craft work to seamlessly integrate
props and rigs and even propel the women down a staircase, all while
maintaining safety standards. But the comedic aspect of “Palm Royale” opened
up more room for the performers to mess around, compared with the brutal,
serious fights that take place in drama series that normally employ stunt teams.
“There was so much freedom to play and to make mistakes and to make it fun,”
Lemmo said.
“It’s different,” Wajih added. “You could be rough around the edges, where
there is a finesse to a comedic performance, especially with such high-level
actresses embodying those characters.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
