Alicia Vela-Bailey
Alicia Vela-Bailey is, born 1982.
Vela-Bailey is a stunt performer, dancer and choreographer who has spent her career doubling leading actresses: Avatar, Total Recall, Underworld: Awakening, Divergent, Lucy, Wonder Woman, and both Avatar sequels. That is a list of films where the audience has watched her at length and credited someone else.
The on-camera work she does under her own name is a narrower and more specific thing. She gets cast when a body needs to move wrong. Diana in Lights Out is a figure defined entirely by how she appears and disappears, the demon in Annabelle: Creation is a contortion act under the effects, and the Female Freak in The Purge is pure predatory posture. The dance background is doing the work in all three: these are performances choreographed rather than acted.
More recently she has been a Recom in Avatar: The Way of Water, appearing again in Avatar: Fire and Ash, and one of the Salem Seven in Agatha All Along. The catalogue here is short, and most of what she has actually done is invisible by design.
Movies (7)
TV (1)
Where to start with Alicia Vela-Bailey
Put Lights Out first. It is a lean, cheap horror film built on a single idea, and her physical performance is the effect the whole thing depends on.
Annabelle: Creation is the same skill applied in a bigger production, and The Purge is the earliest of the three, all body language and no dialogue. Agatha All Along is the recent television version, closer to costume-and-choreography work.
The Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash credits are the interesting ones for a different reason: she doubled a lead on the original film and has now moved in front of the performance-capture camera herself. Underworld: Blood Wars is where the stunt career and the on-screen career overlap most visibly.