In "Reef Break", broadcast every Friday on M6, Poppy Montgomery plays Cat Chambers, a former criminal who has also been a professional surfer in the past. But has the actress filmed the many surf scenes herself?


With Reef Break, broadcast every Friday on M6 since July 3, Poppy Montgomery, revealed thanks to the FBI: reported missing in the early 2000s, marks its return to the small screen four years after the cessation of Unforgettable, its other great television success. She is once again the star of a police series but her character has little to do with investigators Samantha Spade or Carrie Wells since Cat Chambers operates, at the start, on the other side of the law. The heroine of Reef Break is indeed a former criminal, long sought after by the police of Reef Island, who has always managed to escape justice and who, upon her return to the archipelago where she grew up, agrees to collaborate with the island governor's office to resolve thorny cases.
Investigations that she leads in duet with the inspector Wyatt Cole (Desmond Chiam) between two trips to the beach since Cat is also a former surf champion. A past of professional surfer who allows the series to offer us many aquatic sequences and which certainly pushes M6 viewers to wonder if it is really Poppy Montgomery that we see on the screen when Cat is on his board surfing, or if the production used a lining for these stunts that punctuate the 13 episodes of the first and only season of Reef Break.


ABC / Vince Valitutti
"It's never me that you see on the big waves", explains the actress, who also officiates as producer on the series, when TVLine asked if she was the one we saw surfing in the episodes of Reef Break. "Nor even during the sequences where Cat is standing on his board. This is my incredible stunt double, Angie. Shortly before the start of filming, I was surfing in Malibu and I ended up with a black eye [suite à une chute], then the production said to me "No, you will not be riding a wave. The risk is too great". And then it must be said that the other element to take into account is that I am not very gifted. Angie is incredible, she has a real fierce side. She knows how to make flips and a whole bunch of figures in the air. While I'm deeply mediocre in surfing ".
If Poppy Montgomery is therefore dubbed by a professional during most of the sequences taking place on the water, the magic of Hollywood operates and we finally see that fire. The actress also seems to have fun in the shoes of Cat Chambers, a funny and badass heroine who allows her to pay tribute to the series of the 70s and 80s that she adores, such as Magnum, Hawaii, state police, or two cops in Miami. "We wanted to create a kind of beach novel equivalent for television", says Poppy Montgomery to TVLine. "A funny and a little whimsical series. It is not intended to be deep or to win Emmy Awards. I wanted to pay homage to the series that I loved and that I watched in Australia ten years after their original broadcast at United States (laughs) But you never saw women. I was a young surfer in Australia and I watched these guys on TV driving cars, surfing, or doing whatever, and I said "Why do we never see women doing all this?" I can't name a single woman surfer in a series ". The star of Reef Break therefore wanted to remedy this lack by imagining his own police action series, and she succeeded.
Reef Break as seen by Poppy Montgomery: