Vinnie's Adventures In Alaska
"He didn't really do his own stunts, did he?" If you saw Vinnie Kartheiser's action-packed adventure Alaska in movie theaters last summer, the chances are that you asked yourself this question. The answer: Vinnie tells BOP, is yes.
Yet before Vinnie and his on-screen sister, Thora Birch, started doing thie own stunts, they went though four weeks of intense training sessions with the movie's sports consultants. They spent those weeks climbing rocks, jumping off mountains, white water rafting and canoeing. "We went to the set a month ahead of time to learn how to interact with Aggie Jane [the polar bear] and learn how to backpack and rock climb and all that," Vinnie explains.
Those training sessions turned out to be essential for the 17-year-old actor. "This movie is really action-packed," he points out. "Every single day we would be working up at eleven thousand feet altitude, breathing heavily, and the crew had to have these oxygen tanks for us afterward. SO the training was important." Other actors might have requested a stunt double for such physically demanding scenes, but not Vinnie, who says the expereince was "a dream vacation with pay."
However, Vinnie says a stunt double was used in one or two scenes shot in Alaska. "I didn't go over the waterfall and I didn't canoe into the rapids," he admits, adding that it wasn't because he didn't want to do the stunts -- there simply wasn't time in the shooting schedule for him to travel to Alaska. Yet aside Vinnie did all his stunts. "That's really me being thrown into the white water wave. If you look at the face of the caracter swimming in white water or hanging by one arm from a mountain, that's me!"