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Ky Furneaux worked as a stunt performer in Hollywood, where she learned to fight with a long staff, how to fall safely, and what to do when cars filled with petrol bombs exploded above her head. After 16 years, she left stuntwork. But her most extreme experiment was yet to come: 21 days naked in the wilderness.
I've had a few of those moments with stunts where your life might be on the line, but everything just slows down.
There's a sequence in X-Men 3 where mutants are leaping off the ruined end of the Golden Gate Bridge and into the courtyard at Alcatraz. That sequence was probably one of the most precise sequences I've ever had to do, as far as wire stunts.
There were 10 of us going through the air, and every one of us had four people operating our wires like a puppet. It was a really huge flight through the air, and then they had to land us nicely down onto the gravel in Alcatraz.
You are just a puppet on a string.
The pit in front of us was literal concrete and jagged steel. If you are off your mark when the people hit the button, you're going up and down into that concrete area, instead of going on to the safe place to land.
It was just so precise. So that one in particular, we did a couple of months' rehearsal for that, plus some fight sequences.
Another one, that we couldn't really rehearse, was when a character called Magneto throws some cars into the air and another character called Pyro explodes them with fire.
These were real cars, and they would shoot them off the ends of cannons, just like pirate cannons. Once these cars were in the air, someone else pressed the button that exploded a petrol bomb in them.
So these bombs would then explode, but you wouldn't know which trajectory the bombs were going to shoot the cars into. They would have two or three cars in the air at once, landing in this courtyard.
If you watch the sequence, it looks like it could have been computer generated, but it's actually us down in that courtyard playing this whack-a-mole, where we were trying to dodge these exploding cars in the air.
That one goes down as one of the moments where I thought I should have called my mum and said goodbye.
But I'm always up for a challenge. It's like if there's something that makes me nervous, I want to do it until it doesn't make me nervous anymore.
I started moving into [outdoor survival] towards the end of my stunt career. A lot of that was just: 'Where do I feel most alive?' The Hollywood scene was changing a bit. I headed out into the outdoors and realised that's just where my soul sings.
I got this need to just push myself and go a little bit more extreme each time.
And when Discovery asked me the first three times [to do reality TV show Naked and Afraid], I told them no, because there was no way I was going to be naked on television. But they do pixelate, so technically nobody sees my nudity.
What they ended up with was this show that was an incredible look at what human beings are capable of under pressure.
The premise – and I got asked to do the first season, so keep in mind no-one had ever done this before – was a guy and a girl are dropped in the middle of nowhere for 21 days, you have to survive and you can take in one item each. You can tap out. There is no prize money. You do get paid for being out there, but it's not a lot.
It's looking at what are you capable of when you are stripped of everything.
So they're dropping us off in Louisiana swamps, and it's alligator mating season, and it's also reptile mating season. Not only are the alligators a little fiercer, you've got these cottonmouth snakes that are venomous and they're a little more aggressive, too, and they're everywhere.
I'm in a canoe, and they're like, "Take your clothes off now and you have to then just get into waist deep swamp-water." The alligator experts just said, "If you see bubbles, just stop because it might be an alligator."
So the second I'm naked and in that water, all I'm thinking about is: "Where are the alligators?" I'm not actually thinking, "Oh, my gosh, my breasts are out."
Our main [food] staple were snakes. They were everywhere. So honestly, if it moves, you just kill it and eat it. And I learned that venomous snake flesh is a little tastier than non-venomous. I don't know, I can't explain it.
We had the weirdest experience. In mating season, the ducks' glands were producing a different secretion to normal. And one of the days we accidentally boiled one of their glands in with the snake meat and we didn't realise until we started eating it. It tasted so bad we had to throw out the snake that we'd cooked, which was just so sad.
But from that moment on, I could smell where the snakes were in the swamp, like a Spider-Man sense. I could just say, "Oh, there's a snake around here somewhere." It became easier to hunt them.
The funniest thing that I miss, maybe a lot of people feel this way, but when I sleep, even if I'm really hot, I like having even just a sheet over my body.
And that's probably the thing I miss most out there, not having a covering of any sort when you sleep. It's a strange one. I don't miss food that much. I don't miss a comfortable bed. I just miss having a sheet on me when I sleep.
This is an edited excerpt from Conversations, a podcast that draws you deeper into the life story of someone you may, or may not, have heard about — someone who has seen and done amazing things. Listen for free on the ABC listen app.