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	Photo by Travis Pratt Jessie Graff performs a fall from a four-story building.

The 24-year old former state pole-vaulting champion turned Hollywood stunt woman — Graff recently stood in for Maggie Gyllenhaal in "The Dark Knight" — says it's the only occasion she's had butterflies at work.

"Normally I'm not nervous at all beforehand," she said. "However, there is always that second at the beginning of a fall when you feel a 'drop' in your stomach and that does create a little anxiety. But that one time (on the set of the independent film "The Ghost of the Black Dhalia"), I had to fall 40-feet, backwards, in the dark, and I was a little nervous," she explained. "What happened though, it's almost unexplainable, was that the 'drop' in my stomach — it completely took my nervousness away. The rest was easy." Right.

Graff graduated from Urbana High School in 2002 and still holds the Maryland high school indoor and outdoor pole-vaulting records. She grew up climbing trees, backflipping on six-inch wooden balance beams and spinning around the uneven bars as a gymnast, but went to college on a track and field scholarship. In 2006, she left the University of Nebraska with a theater degree, neither acting nor competing athletically in the conventional sense any longer.

Instead, she leaps from airplanes, dives off rocky cliffs, paddles down the Mississippi River in inflatable canoes, boxes, practices Kung Fu and trapeze arts, hops freight trains and horses — and once — jumped from a speeding motorcycle into a moving car. Some of this is for kicks; often, she gets paid as a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

"This is exactly what I should be doing," said Graff, who has also worked on the sets of "Die Hard 4" and "G.I. Joe," which is due to be released next year. Last month, donning a blonde wig, green sweater and white sneaks, she impersonated daytime T.V. talk hostess Ellen DeGeneres, knocking out a tumbling pass.

She's filming "Transformers 2" and doing stuff she's not at liberty to discuss.

"There are a lot of activities that I really enjoy, that I'd pay vast quantities of money to do for fun, for the rush, and now my job is dedicated to getting better at them."

On the last day of her final course at Nebraska, Graff parked her fully packed car, mountain bike included, and had it waiting for the drive to Los Angeles. She struggled briefly, landing stunt work once a month while supplementing her income coaching gymnastics. Overall, it's gone remarkably well, noting her height and body type — 5-foot-7 and 125 pounds — make her an ideal substitute for leading leadies.

"A lot of the stunt woman come from a gymnastics background and they tend to be shorter," Graff said. "The first thing everyone asks is 'How tall are you?' They tell me that my height is really going to help keep work coming my way."

Today, she's working an average of four to five days a month, it varies with movie schedules, and making enough (an average of $800 a day when on set) that she dropped coaching. She prefers to stay busy building her ever-increasing skill set with motorcycle and auto stunt-driving workshops, stick-fighting and martial arts training. She's maintaining her gymnastic repertoire, mastering circus stunts and her earning her sky-diving license.

"She was always very agile, always wanting to climb when she was a child, always right on 'the edge,' walking on fences, things like that," said her mom, Ginny MacColl, a former New York City actress who starred in national Mr. Clean, Jordache jeans and Sizzlean bacon commercials in 1980s. "When she was in preschool in Manhattan, if the kids were outside and told to stand in line, the teacher would just have to look up to find her. She'd be the one in the tree."

As a child, Graff idolized television characters like "Xena, Warrior Princess" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"She always wanted to be a 'Super Hero'," her mother said, and by the time she was a teenager she was practicing their stunts.

"In high school, I'd go in the backyard after watching those shows and try to do everything they did," Graff said with a laugh. "I taught myself how to run up a tree and do a backflip."

In high school she'd often out jump the boys in the pole vault and in college, leaping 13 feet 9 1/4 inches, she qualified for the NCAA championships several times. She left Georgia Tech where she excelled as a freshman in hopes of pursuing Olympic dreams at Nebraska, but her career was derailed by ankle injuries that required surgery.

After that, Graff initially planned to follow in her mom's shoes as an actress. She'd trailed after her mother to dance classes as a child in New York, always ready to join in. Everything changed, however, at a Wonder Woman movie audition in Washington D.C., over a college break.

Graff brought the wrong resumé.

Rather than bringing a summary detailing her acting experience, she brought a resumé that highlighted her athletic and gymnastic accomplishments.

"The woman just looked at it and said, 'Why are you here? Do you act? You should be a stunt person,'" Graff recounted. "And I thought, 'Of course, that's it!'"

Suddenly, she had a new goal.

"That moment with that agent in D.C, that was the moment that I knew what I was going to do," Graff said. "She gave me a phone number of someone in the stunt business to talk to and it was like I already knew this was what I was going to do. I don't think I've doubted that ever since."

Once in L.A., she started driving around to sets to meet stunt coordinators and passing around head shots to everyone she met. She rented an apartment with a few people in the stunt business and soon enough got on the hit television show "Scrubs."

Graff, however, is not a T.V. or movie buff. She's not overwhelmed meeting Zach Braff or having Heath Ledger hold a knife to her throat.

However, she doesn't rule out more traditional character acting in the future.

"Jackie Chan," she said, "is my role model."