Being a stuntman is Hollywood's most dangerous profession. There were two stunt-related deaths last year. It is now in chaos and spiralling out of control because a stuntwoman has filed a charge of sex discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission challenging the age-old practice of "wigging," in which stuntmen don wigs and women's clothing to double for actresses. The changes coming to the stunt community and to the industry at large is long overdue.

Veteran stuntwoman Deven MacNair, who worked on the set of the upcoming film ‘The Domestics’, filed the complaint against the actors' union SAG-AFTRA and the film's production company, TD Productions, back in September, but Deadline, which broke the story, first reported on 6th February.

This act is quite similar to another which has been debated about in Hollywood for many years: "painting down" a stuntperson. "Painting down" is when a stuntperson who is not of the race or ethnicity of the person being doubled and has makeup applied to make them visually passable for that role. It's similar to blackface and has deep roots, and is still happening today. "Painting down" takes jobs away from stuntpeople of color while "wigging" takes opportunities away from stuntwomen and gives them to stuntmen, who already dominate the craft.

What spawned this revived interest in "wigging" was when MacNair was working on the New Orleans-based set of MGM's The Domestics back in November 2016. She alleges that the film's stunt coordinator, Nick Gillard, decided to do a "gag" — the industry term for a stunt — in a wig and heels because it was too dangerous for her to complete.

While MacNair, who claims to have been the only stuntwoman on set that day, said she was "trained and able-bodied" enough to have completed the "gag" but Gillard did it anyway. Gillard sticks by claims that the "gag" was too unsafe — even insinuating, in an email exchange with MacNair from January 2017, that MacNair was unqualified for the job. MacNair was also called "a hater" and someone who's "trying to gain celebrity by hating" in Gillard's response.

The lawsuit filed by MacNair calls this is a clear violation of a weakly worded 2014 union rule that states that stunt coordinators "shall endeavour to identify and recruit qualified" stuntpeople for jobs who specifically match the race and/or sex of the star being doubled.

"I owe my career to stuntmen, and I am grateful for everything they've taught me and for keeping me safe for the last 20 years. I am beyond grateful, but this has to stop," MacNair told Deadline, saying she has gotten death threats since coming forward and this her career "hasn't been helped" by doing so. "It was an easy stunt, and every stuntwoman and stuntman should be offended that they played the 'safety card.' Literally, anyone who drove to the set that day could have done it."

According to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, when looking at the top-grossing films for 2017, the action genre has the lowest percentage of women relative to men in terms of representation at only 13 percent. Not only that but stuntwomen — when they are hired and don't lose out to "wigging" — face unequal pay in relation to stuntmen.

MacNair told Deadline, “I can’t believe we’re still fighting about this in 2018 — that there is a need for this fight, but there is. This should have been resolved when Julie Johnson brought this up in the 1970s, but it wasn’t, so here we are.”