Helmet Hair Magazine.com is thrilled to introduce stuntwoman extraordinaire, Gloria O’Brien Fontenot—a rider with heart, soul and lots of panache. Gloria can be seen in the upcoming movies “Blade III” (motorcycles for Jessica Biele)  “Constantine” and “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

Gloria and fellow stuntwoman, Darlene Williams, founded the V-10 Stunt Team to support other stuntwomen and improve the quality of their abilities, and work in the stunt community with the goal of commitment to individualism and freedom of career pursuit. Along with being a multi-talented stuntwoman, Gloria shares insight on balancing life, being a mother of two (which is daring in itself) and her career.  We caught up with Gloria to uncover what inspires her to harness the spirit of motorcycling.

HH: At what point in your life did you realize that, "Hey, I want to be a stuntwoman."    

GOF:  I spent my whole childhood working as a singer and an actress, however I also did Ballet for seven years and gymnastics. I competed in gymnastics and that was my real passion. It never even occurred to me that the career of being a stuntwoman existed until I was at LA Valley College working out at the gymnastic gym and met other ex-competitive gymnasts-turned stunt professionals. It took a few years of training with other stunt people and learning many of the different skills and modifying my gymnastic abilities into stunt skills to get established. Most of the first few years of my career were in the fields of acrobatics and martial arts since those were my original specialties. I also became a SCUBA Dive master and did underwater stunts and safety. I didn't get introduced to any of  the motorcycle sports until 1999 when I first went to a motocross track with the guy I was dating at the time. I had never seen anything like it. I went to watch him a few times, then decided that I wasn't going to sit around and watch anymore, it was time to try it. Since I started so late in life at motorcycles, it has taken a lot of time and hard work to become even adequate. I felt like a fish out of water for a very long time. I describe my first few years of riding as sheer terror. If I hadn't loved it so much, I never would have kept doing it.  

HH: Guessing you are a product of the 80's, there were so few (known) motorcycle stuntwomen that existed during that decade, so what exactly was your inspiration to get involved in such  extreme, two wheeled stunts?  

GOF: I wasn't allowed to watch much TV or movies, just perform in them, so I didn't grow up thinking anything about stunts. When I first saw motocross in 1999,  I started riding just because it was fun. I started in motocross and only did that for the first few years. Subsequently though, stunt guys that knew I was riding and would be at the tracks started to hire or recommend me here or there for things they thought I could do. My first "motorcycle job" was on VIP doubling Natalie Cigliuti (guest actress)  for a week for riding a street bike. The second one ended up being a job on a low budget movie filming deep in the jungles of Jamaica. I had only been riding for 6 months and had just gotten over a severed achilles and the surgical repair that put it back together (a gymnastic injury). I had to do a head on, near miss with a Mac truck with a passenger on the back of my bike, and then some riding around and then, crash the bike with the passenger and fall down a hill. Of course, it was a really old scooter type with very bad controls, old street tires on wet clay type dirt, which actually made some things easier and some things harder. It wasn't built for the dirt hills and the wet clay surfaces we were riding on and we were slipping all over the place. We were also in sandals and skirts! The Mac truck didn't have brakes and so they had it going up hill and us going down hill so they could get it to stop at the end of each take and run behind the wheels and put blocks so it wouldn't slide backwards down the hill.. This is the kind of stuff you have to deal with sometimes. I remember one take on the head on - near miss where my passenger and I, (Dorinda Moore who doubles one of the girls on Charmed) watched the bumper of the Mac Truck literally pass less than one inch from our knees against the bike.