Art
The New Face of Hollywood: Michelle Khare
Look out, Tinseltown. A new action star has arrived, and her name is Michelle Khare. But you won’t find her in movie theaters—you’ll find her on YouTube.
From the outside, Michelle Khare's office looks like the average Burbank home— white walled, sun drenched, a few fruit trees planted in the yard. But open the front door and it quickly becomes clear that things aren’t what they seem.
Arrayed along the walls: a Secret Service hat, a “Madame President” name plate, a biography of Harry Houdini. There’s a framed poster of Khare in a black bathing suit, upside down in a tank of water, a film-noir-style rendering of something that, improbably, happened in real life—and involved her holding her breath for more than two minutes and 30 seconds as she unwrenched herself from a clutch of chains.
“Imagine me, calling a fabricator and saying, ‘Hi, I’d like to make a Harry Houdini–style water torture cell,’ ” Khare says with a laugh. Dressed in athletic pants, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and sneakers, she projects the energy of someone equally game to drop everything and run a marathon—or call every number in the proverbial phone book until she gets the answer she wants. “We hit a lot of dead ends, but we finally figured it out.”
Downstairs, the garage has been converted into a prop closet. “Here’s the mask I used to sneak into the latest Mission: Impossible premiere,” Khare says, removing a sheet of plastic from an eerily real latex facade that looks like her polar opposite—white haired, worn down, bedraggled. “It was very challenging because this is, for sure, a hard departure from who I am. I had the choice of, should I just wear a nice dress? Maybe I’ll get to meet Tom Cruise and take a beautiful photo? Or should I really swing for the fences and try to do something memorable and maybe look a little crazy in the process?”
Michelle Khare is affectionately known as "YouTube's Daredevil."
© Jim Krantz
That might as well be Khare’s M.O. Over the past seven years, the 32-year-old founder and face of the YouTube documentary series Challenge Accepted has parlayed her ability to swing for the fences, regardless of the consequences—hits to her pride, bones, or often, both—into more than 5 million subscribers who faithfully tune in to see her attempt mental and physical feats that would deter even the most up-for-anything of individuals. To name a few: fielding 911 calls; training to go from martial arts novice to black belt in the span of 90 days; and surprising the most famous actor in the world at his own movie premiere. (She got her picture with Cruise when she whipped off the mask in front of a crowd of red-carpet onlookers who were convinced that Cruise himself was beneath the disguise.)
“I basically looked like Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder,” Khare says, smoothing the mask’s errant white hairs. “I’m really happy with how it turned out.”
A new kind of action star, Khare makes the process of pulling off a stunt as much a part of the show as the stunt itself, which is why she wants to show me where her latest—and, arguably, wildest, most death defying, all the superlatives—stunt came to life. Upstairs, past a break room with a cushy, pillow-laden nook and more memorabilia—figure skates from her Olympic training episode, a bronze Mickey Mouse from her stint as a Disney Imagineer—sits a bare bones conference room better known as mission-planning central. “This is where we plotted the plane stunt,” she says. “These walls have seen things.”
By “plane stunt,” she means hanging off the side of a military aircraft at 150 miles per hour, no parachute, no goggles, with a gray suit tailored to match the one Cruise wore in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Khare did that in June, strapped to the side of a C-130 Hercules as it soared 2,000 feet in the air. Going through her mind, at the time: “Just hold on and remain calm,” she says, as if describing a Saturday-morning yoga class, not an act that would induce blackout-level adrenaline in most humans.
She trained for it the only way she knew how: obsessively. Wind tunnels. Hurricane simulation fans. Custom neck-strengthening regimens. “It wasn’t just about surviving the stunt,” she says. “It was: Can I do it, and look badass doing it, too?” She’ll get into the details later. For now, there’s a more pressing item on her agenda:
“Should we get some lunch?”
Khare has more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube.
© Jim Krantz
Challenge Accepted launched in 2018 and has since become a genre-defying juggernaut—half documentary, half daredevil performance, all Khare. In each episode, she trains for and attempts to pass the entry requirements for elite professions: firefighter, NASA astronaut, Secret Service agent, chess grandmaster. The stakes are often physical, always psychological. Can she complete Navy SEAL Hell Week? Represent a client in a mock murder trial? Pass for a Victoria’s Secret runway model after weeks of grueling prep?
The format may sound YouTube friendly—slick editing, eye-catching thumbnails, stunts that invite clicks—but it’s not built for scrolling or swiping. One of her most-watched episodes, the 90-day black belt challenge, is 77 minutes long. “For that, we took 90 days of footage and condensed it,” she says. She’s steering her car down a traffic-thronged thoroughfare, unintimidated (as, perhaps, I should have expected) at the prospect of carrying on intelligent conversation while driving in Los Angeles.
“It’s a long episode, but it moves. Every moment had to earn its place.” In an era obsessed with instant gratification, at a time when attention spans are purportedly shrinking, Khare is proof that depth and duration still have an audience—if the story is strong enough.
“This notion that younger generations don’t have an attention span, I don’t think that’s the whole truth—I think everyone is brutal with their time,” she says. “It’s my role as a creator, host and producer to make sure every single moment provides value entertainment and inspiration for our audience. I’d never want an episode to feel gratuitous. I know we’re not in a movie theater. People can get up and go at any time, right? So we’ve got to make sure that we’re providing something of worth to them.”
Khare underwater, a nod to her death-defying Houdini stunt.
© Jim Krantz
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Khare grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, the kind of place where, by her own admission, the movie theater was all but a place of worship. “There wasn’t much else to do,” she says over a truffle chicken sandwich. “So every weekend, we’d go see something—kids movies, indie dramas, whatever was playing.”
Her father, an immigrant from India, learned English, in part, by watching action films. Tom Cruise was a household fixture, as familiar as the living room furniture. “Movies were our way of bonding. We’d go as a family, then come home and talk about what worked and what didn’t. We were that kind of nerdy.” In school, she didn’t fit neatly into any one mold. There was fencing—she qualified for the Junior Olympics—but also science fair. Tae kwon do but also calculus. “I just liked being involved in everything,” she says. “I always wanted my schedule to be full, exciting, structured.” Dabbling in a little bit of everything, she latched onto a motto.
“One of my favorite phrases is ‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one,’ ” she says. “Most people only know the first half of it.”
At Dartmouth, she majored in digital media technology, balancing coding courses with film theory and production internships. She interned for DreamWorks Animation, then Steve Carell’s production company. But creative ambition clashed with logistical reality. “When I told my parents I wanted to do something artistic, they said, ‘OK, tell us everything. What’s the plan?’ ” she recalls. The plan had to include income, insurance and multiple backup options. She didn’t mind. “I actually think that mindset helped,” she says. “It meant that when I left my job to launch my channel, I was as prepared as anyone could be for a career that’s inherently unplannable.”
That job was at BuzzFeed, where she served as a producer during its meteoric rise in the mid-2010s. “It was like paid grad school in digital storytelling,” she says. “I learned to shoot, edit, direct, act, write. I made hundreds of videos in two years. I learned how to fail, and how to recover fast.”
Viral content creator by day, professional cyclist by night. Or rather, by weekend—around the same time that Khare accepted the BuzzFeed job, she signed a contract to cycle competitively, which meant flying to races across the country, sprinting in crowded packs and training like an Olympian while holding down an office job. “It was very Hannah Montana,” she laughs. “By Friday afternoon, I was at LAX. By Monday morning, I was back at my desk, editing videos.” It was unsustainable, but she didn’t want to give up either side. She sought a third way.
Khare attributes much of the success of Challenge Accepted to her team.
© Jim Krantz
“I thought, what if I could create something that combined these two worlds?” she says. Challenge Accepted was born of that collision: a physically rigorous, narratively cinematic series that would showcase her athletic drive, her compulsion to try new things and her storytelling skills in equal measure.
She started with an approach of “three for the studio, one for me.” There are the videos that will ring a bell to anyone familiar with the ice bucket challenge—“I Tried an Herbal Infusion Body Detox,” “I Got My Legs Professionally Shaved by a Barber,” “I Trained like a Victoria’s Secret Model for 5 Weeks.” While some episodes were as short as four minutes, others, like the Victoria’s Secret one, ran north of 20 minutes. Attuned to her analytics, Khare realized she could dream bigger. “We hit this inflection point where those more in-depth projects started far outperforming anything else on the channel,” she says. “Over time, we peeled away all the other things and took a gamble—what if we only focused on the big projects?”
Khare frequently speaks in the plural. She attributes much of the success of Challenge Accepted to her team of six core collaborators—including Garrett Kennell, her go-to director as well as her husband—and a large pool of talented freelancers. “Some of our episodes might have the shininess of a Hollywood production, but at the end of the day, it’s a community effort. It’s very grassroots.”
Before Challenge Accepted, Khare worked for Buzzfeed as a video producer.
© Jim Krantz
“When we were nominated for the Streamy Awards,” she adds, referring to the 2023 Oscars of streaming, “we really, really pushed for everyone to be able to come. A lot of these awards shows don’t let you do that. They very graciously allowed us to bring everyone, and when we won Show of the Year”—best picture, essentially—“it was incredibly special. It was a team achievement.” The moment is memorialized in a photo on the mantel at HQ, the gang embracing each other and Khare, a gold statuette in their grip.
To be sure, there have been setbacks. Fatigue. Failed challenges. In an episode in which she takes a crash course at the world’s most prestigious butler academy, in the Netherlands, she (spoiler alert) flunks out. During her 90-day black belt journey, she fails to break a brick with her hands—the last requirement for passing. At the end of the 77-minute episode, at the foot of a mountaintop shrine, she takes the denial issued by her instructors in stride. In BuzzFeed Internet parlance, you’ll never believe what happened next.
“I kept going to class,” she says. “Every Saturday. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to do this whether or not it makes the video. I’m going to break this brick. I want to do it, I have to do it, I am called to do it.’”
On day 264—roughly six months after the 90-day challenge ended—she broke the brick, and in a video posted on Instagram, broke down in tears.
“But ironically, that wasn’t needed to make the story complete,” she says. “I was surprised by the audience’s reaction to how powerful it was to show like the honest, raw failure from that moment. Failure is where the story happens. To cut that out would be robbing the audience of the most important part.”
Khare successfully re-created Tom Cruise's infamous plane stunt.
© Kevin Stiller
Michelle leveraged Red Bull Air Force to recreate the Rogue Nation stunt.
© Aaron Fitzgerald
Some challenges, Khare can keep chipping away at. Others are now-or-never gambits, as was the case with the Rogue Nation stunt. The notion of it came about the way many of her projects do, with a pie-in-the-sky idea: What if we did a Tom Cruise stunt? What if I actually did it?
In the conference room of Challenge Accepted HQ, Khare and her team began brainstorming. What would it take? How do you rent a military aircraft? Who approves that? What does insurance look like for something like this? Who calls the FAA? “It was, by far, the craziest idea we’ve ever had,” she says. “So of course, we had to try.”
She called Red Bull first. “I’m not just saying this because this was a Red Bull collab—but genuinely, they’ve pulled off some of the most insane stunts in history,” she says. “It’s really rare to find a collaborative partner who’s even willing to go in that headspace of, ‘OK, we’re gonna be a little crazy and defy the laws of physics, but let’s go there.’”
From idea to execution, the stunt took six months—“extremely fast,” Khare says. “Faster than I thought would be possible.” Partners were assembled—Safari Technologies welded a custom camera arm onto the plane. A helicopter with a RED camera mounted on a Cineflex gimbal circled the aircraft during flight, piloted by Red Bull Air Force pilot Aaron Fitzgerald. “We had a full aviation crew,” says Khare. “A lens technician, a stunt team inside the plane. So many calls with the FAA. I was wearing a gray suit, just like Tom’s in the film. No goggles. Just contacts, custom scleral lenses. One little pebble in the eye at that speed, and it’s over—that pebble could be going at the speed of a bullet.”
The most terrifying part? “A parachute is actually unsafe in this context,” Khare says. “If it deploys while you’re strapped in, you become the pinpoint. You could literally be ripped in half.”
The only safety backup was a hand signal: one gesture, and the crew inside would open the door and pull her in. “That’s it,” she says. “That’s the margin.”
Michelle Khare, aka “YouTube’s daredevil,” at the Hollywood sign on July 2.
© Jim Krantz
Some of the most important training was mental. Under the tutelage of the Red Bull Air Force’s Sean MacCormac—“one of the greatest aerial acrobat performers ever,” she says—Khare made multiple trips to an indoor skydiving wind tunnel. “We would do repetitions where I would stand in front of a machine blasting winds well over 130 miles per hour, and he would, like, yell at me to visualize all of the steps of the stunt—how it could go well, how it could go wrong,” she says. “It was all about maintaining breath and composure. A large part of this stunt is the performance— face camera, keep your eyes open.”
“She had to really commit to the experience and go for it, especially for the portion of it that involved the unknown,” says MacCormac. “This was something unlike anything she had done before.”
Breathing exercises helped, as did upper body strength training to account for the pressure that 30 minutes in the air would exert on her neck and shoulders. “You’re basically holding an upward dog that whole time,” she says. She monitored her resting heart rate, but fortunately, she’s been doing that for a while now. “I usually wear a Garmin,” she says. “It’s good to have a sense of my heart rate, with all the things we do.”
On the red carpet of the latest Mission: Impossible premiere, Khare asked her idol for advice on how to pull off a “one of one” Tom Cruise stunt. “You just have to train,” he told her. “You have to know what you’re doing. I build things up methodically and very thoroughly.” His words rang in her mind as MacCormac put her through her paces. (So, too, did his praise—“You’re doing well,” Cruise told her, “that Houdini stunt—that’s intense.”) She meditated on his parting words: “Be competent, don’t be careful.”
In Challenge Accepted, Khare trained for a taekwondo black belt in 90 days.
© Jim Krantz
Khare earned a black belt in under a year.
© Jim Krantz
The week leading up to that morning in early June, Khare had nightmares. The morning of, she was nervous. “There’s producer Michelle and talent Michelle,” she says. “Producer Michelle thinks, ‘This will be incredible.’ Talent Michelle is like, ‘Oh no, now I have to do it.’”
But when she arrived at the airfield, something clicked. “The crew was so ready, so prepared, so calm,” she says. “It was all systems go.”
"If I can just inspire one young girl today, I’ve done my job."
© Jim Krantz
Back in the editing suite at Challenge Accepted HQ, Khare cues up a clip of the stunt. Hanging off the side of the C-130 Hercules, she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t flinch. Even as the plane picks up speed and her feet fly back from the narrow ledge on which they were perched, she looks straight ahead, in defiance of the wind, and later, looks down, in defiance of her fear of heights. It’s a sequence equal parts terrifying and triumphant—in other words, cinematic. “About halfway through, it became very, very fun,” she says, smiling at the memory. “At a certain point the adrenaline was just so high, which I had not experienced before. I’ve experienced adrenaline from physical activity, of course, but this was different—it was adrenaline from sensory overload.”
“There’s a lot going through your mind in that moment,” says MacCormac. “It’s about processing fear not as a premonition, but as a heightened state of awareness of what’s going on.”
The moment the plane landed, Khare let go, dropped to the ground and let the tears flow.
“It was the greatest thrill of my life,” she says. “I’ll never forget embracing the crew. Our director of photography was someone I sat next to at BuzzFeed. To think we went from there to amilitary tarmac with two Red Komodos strapped to the outsideof a plane,” she trails off, shaking her head, eyes shining. “Really, it was a team accomplishment. I played a small part.”
Humility aside, the push-pull between producer Michelle andtalent Michelle propels her forward. “We don’t do easy things,”she says. “If it’s not challenging, it’s not a story we’re going tocover.” She compares her process to stunt performers, many of whom she’s trained with and now hires. “They’re often hidden, but they’re heroes. And now, to collaborate with them on our biggest episodes? It’s a full-circle moment.”
The next big thing: the Great World Race, in which she’ll attempt to run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. (It happens in November, and she’s been regularly logging 14-mile runs.) After that: climbing the Burj Khalifa. “They’ve only let a handful of people do it,” she says, one of whom happens to be—you guessed it—Tom Cruise. “We don’t have enough clout, yet—but I use the word ‘yet’ for a reason.”
She’s also eyeing a Bollywood project. “Even if I’m just an extra inthe background—I just want to dance,” she laughs. “It might actually be more nerve-racking than being strapped to the side of a plane.”
To Khare, an action hero: someone who is living their life to its fullest.
© Jim Krantz
Khare and Kennell live in a house around the corner from her office. It’s decorated with more memorabilia from their adventures together—a painting from Khare’s recent stint at a samurai school in Japan, a scrapbook of well wishes from people she’s met through past challenges, with which Kennell surprised her for her most recent birthday. Then there’s the Post-It note on her bathroom mirror that reads, If I can just inspire one young girl today, I’ve done my job.
“When I started my channel, I was struggling with the push and pull of gotta get views, gotta make money, but those views are real people, and impact means something, long term,” she says. “So I wrote that Post-It note as a reminder to myself, and every day, I come back and look at it.”
It reminds her of her own idols: Cruise, Houdini, David Blaine, Evel Knievel, Jeff Probst—“greatest host of all time,” Khare notes—and the fact that “all of those people are men.” As ever, she’s undaunted. “All it means is that the runway of Challenge Accepted is defined by me.” It can go on and go anywhere she desires—or, more accurately, anywhere she fears.
“To me, that’s what an action hero is—someone who is living their life to its fullest and conquering fear in the process,” she says. Even—perhaps especially—someone building an empire out of what would appear to be a sunny, suburban house.
Khare is on a special back cover of the Fall '25 issue of The Red Bulletin.
© Photo by Jim Krantz; layout by Tara Thompson
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