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On very high jumps, like the ones for "Alias" and "Predators," she'll wear a spine protector and a girdle for extra padding. She sometimes uses special booties to protect her feet.
If she's jumping into water, she checks the temperature first: Cold water is thicker than warm water, and harder. A certified scuba diver, Pascoe also puts on her wet suit and dives in beforehand to check for dangerous reefs or rocks below the surface.
Borrowing from her experience as a collegiate diver, she maps out the precise twists, turns and rotations in her head before each high fall. Unlike in competitive diving, however, she isn't graded on her form but on whether she stays in character of someone who might be recoiling from a gunshot wound, knocked unconscious or screaming in terror from being pushed off a cliff.
"In diving, it's all about looking pretty and having perfect form," she says. "When you get in the stunt world, it's all about making it look ugly."
Usually gregarious, Pascoe has a rule that no one talk to her right before her jump. The silence helps her concentrate.
"One time I was jumping off a cliff in Malibu Creek State Park and a P.A. [production assistant] starts yakking at me about shoes. Normally I would talk about shoes any day, but I said, 'Can you be quiet? I'm trying to jump off a cliff.'"
SAG 2013: Winners | Show highlights | Complete list | Red carpet
At her home in Van Nuys, Pascoe keeps an antique cherry wood cabinet full of what she calls her "little treasures," photos of some of her spectacular dives, set antics and mementos, including sea shells from the beaches she has visited for cliff dives.
Unlike many of her peers, Pascoe says she's avoided serious injuries — except for the time she fractured her tailbone in college when she hit the bottom of a pool — although she's had plenty of bruises and a few near misses.
Preparing for a cliff dive on Catalina, she called off the stunt at the last minute when she saw seaweed in the ocean below, a sign that the tide had receded and the water was too shallow.
She also had a near-disaster on the movie "Poseidon," as she was hanging from a curtain 35 feet in the air inside a casino on the doomed ship. Just before she was about to let go and crash onto a blackjack table below, she noticed an elderly woman still sitting at the table. She pulled back.
"There's an 80-year-old extra under me," she recalled yelling at the director. "I don't want to kill her."
