Top ten most dangerous movie jobs

Does Kathryn Bigelow feel fear? We suspect not. The director of such action fare as Point Break, Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker has forged a successful career in a very male-dominated profession and even survived a few years of marriage to James Cameron, and now she’s back with another macho movie, Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker. “Fear has a bad reputation, but I think that’s ill-deserved,” she says of her latest effort which follows an elite Army bomb squad unit that risk their lives every time they’re called into action. Lavished with critical praise and heaped with festival awards, it places fear and danger centre stage examining how and why these men, led by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) do what they do, often volunteering for such perilous missions.

It was this fear factor that inspired Bigelow (“When I learned [about] these men… I knew I had found my next film,”), and got us here at Boxwish musing on other dangerous movie professions. Not those gigs that are glamorised and sexed-up beyond recognition (such as spies, we’re guessing most MI6 agents don’t look like Daniel Craig in a pair of swim shorts), but those that genuinely carry a risk of dying while on the job. We’re talking salt of the earth stuff that ratchets up your life insurance and involves getting your hands dirty. And so we fire a military salute to The Hurt Locker’s Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit with ten more jobs that really are for only the bravest of boys.