19 Times Actors Got Wildly Injured On Set — And The Filmmakers Were Like "Put That In!!!"
1.In The Princess Bride, Christopher Guest, who played Count Rugen, actually knocked out Cary Elwes, who played Westley, in the scene where Rugen hits Westley on the head with his sword. The take was used because “it was the only one that looked so real,” Elwes said.
"Chris [Guest] swung the heavy sword down toward my head. However, as fate would have it, it landed just a touch harder than either of us anticipated. And that, folks, was the last thing I remember from that day's shoot," Elwes revealed. "I woke up in the emergency room, still in costume, to the frightening sound of stitches being sewn into my skull."
2.In a comedic moment of 1941, John Belushi's Kelso falls not once but twice as he's trying to get back onto his plane. He then recovers with an ironic bravado. The second fall — the more serious one — was not scripted. Belushi actually fell off the wing and landed on his head, sustaining such a serious injury he had to go to the hospital. However, it made the scene even funnier, and it was kept in.
3.While filming The Passion of Christ, Jim Caviezel was hit by a cross that weighed over 250 pounds. "It fell on my head, and I bit through my tongue and my cheek," he said. "And it was actually in the film. You see blood streaming out of my mouth."
4.At one point in Blade Runner, Daryl Hannah's Pris runs and falls onto a van, jamming her elbow into the window before continuing to flee. This was not in the script — Hannah's slip was an accident. She finished the take, then had her elbow looked at and found out it was chipped in eight places. However, it added to her character's desperation and was kept in.
5.Jake Gyllenhaal was always meant to hit the mirror in Nightcrawler, but it wasn't supposed to break. When it did, it cut Gyllenhaal's hand, and he had to go to the ER to get stitches. The scene was left in as-is.
6.Similarly, in Foxcatcher, Channing Tatum was meant to hit the mirror, but he wasn't meant to break through the mirror. "He punched that thing with his head three times and shattered it, and put his head through it and through the frame behind the mirror and through the drywall that the mirror was hanging on and left a divot two inches deep," director Bennett Miller revealed. "When we took the mirror down, there was a hole in the wall. And he actually cut himself, and you see his blood in that scene. This was somebody uncorking something that you can't make up. It's inside you somewhere or it's not."
7.Martin Sheen was actually not directed to punch the mirror at all in the breakdown scene from Apocalypse Now. Sheen later admitted he was actually "dangerously drunk" and having a real breakdown in the scene, and the punch, which caused heavy bleeding, was unscripted. It remained in the final cut.
The rest of the shoot was equally intense, and he ended up having a heart attack. Because it was a five-hour ride to the nearest hospital, Sheen had to be airlifted out.
8.Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin slicing open his hand in Django Unchained was also accidental — DiCaprio actually sliced it and kept going with the scene despite the bleeding. At first, director Quentin Tarantino was unsure whether he wanted to use the moment in the movie. He filmed multiple versions of the rest of the scene, which saw DiCaprio touch Kerry Washington's face — in some takes, DiCaprio wiped fake blood on her face, and in other takes, he simply touched it. Tarantino ended up preferring the takes with the blood, and the scene became one of the most memorable in the film.
9.Bradley Cooper almost killed himself while method-acting in Burnt. The scene where his character — a chef who has just hit rock bottom — puts a bag over his head in an attempt to suffocate himself was actually improvised by Cooper, who was immersed in the scene. "It was late at night, and we didn't have much time, and the bag thing just sort of happened in one of the takes," Cooper said. He was saved by costar Matthew Rhys, who said he was genuinely afraid Cooper might die. The improvised scene made it into the final film.
10.While filming the Rocky and Drago fight scene in Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone told his costar, Dolph Lundgren, to truly try to knock him out so that it would look more realistic. "At one point, he hit me so hard on the top of the head I felt my spine compress," Stallone later revealed. "He then hit me with an almighty uppercut. That night, my chest and heart started to swell, and I had to be helicopter-ambulanced from my hotel to a nearby emergency room. I was told that Dolph had punched my rib cage into my chest, compressing my heart. If it had swollen any more, I would have died." Stallone was in the ICU for nine days.
11.Stallone similarly ended up majorly injured after another fight became a little too real. While starring in The Expendables, he said, "My fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I'm not joking. I haven't told anyone this, but I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck."
12.Lorenza Izzo almost drowned while filming The Green Inferno. The frightening incident occurred while shooting the scene where her character Justine tries to escape a canoe of cannibals and jumps into the water. Izzo grabbed a rock and fought against the current as she screamed. Director Eli Roth had given her a safe word but said, "It was so loud that when she was screaming it at the top of her lungs, none of us heard her." They thought she was acting until they realized she was shouting in English and Spanish. The footage ended up in the film.
13.Bo Derek, who played Jane in 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man, was almost killed by a lion onscreen. The lion — which had fixated on Derek — unexpectedly darted for her while filming a scene where she first meets Tarzan (played by Miles O'Keeffe). O'Keeffe put himself between the lion and Derek, who tried to crawl to safety into the water, where the lion would not follow. She got away, but not before the lion sliced her shoulder with his paw. The footage stayed in the final cut — in fact, the scene was adjusted so that the attack could be included.
14.The Birds' Tippi Hedren said that in the scene where her character is viciously attacked by birds, she was told the mechanical birds were not working, so the director, Alfred Hitchcock, used live birds instead. For five days, Hedren said, live birds (that were trained to peck her) were thrown at her and even tied to her. When one almost pecked her eye, she broke down and had to spend a week in bed due to exhaustion. This is the footage you see in the film.
"It was brutal and ugly and relentless," Hedren said. "I was never frightened, I was just overwhelmed and in some form of shock, and I just kept saying to myself over and over again, 'I won’t let him break me.'" When Hitchcock called "cut" on the last take, Hedren said, "I just sat there on the floor, unable to move, and began sobbing from sheer exhaustion. Minutes passed before I looked up to discover that everyone had just left me there in the middle of that vast, silent soundstage, completely spent, empty, and alone."
15.Ellen Burstyn permanently injured her back while filming The Exorcist. In the scene, a possessed Reagan pushes Burstyn's character to the floor. "I landed on my back and [director William Friedkin] said, 'Cut, take two.' And I said, 'Billy, he's pulling me too hard,' because I had a wire pulling me to the floor," Burstyn said. "And Billy said, 'well it has to look real.' And I said, 'I know it has to look real, but I'm telling you, I could get hurt.' And so he said, 'ok, don't pull her so hard.' But then I'm not sure that he didn't cancel that behind my back because the guy smashed me into the floor."
Instead of cutting when she was hurt, Brustyn says Friedkin directed the cinematographer to focus on her. The take ended up in the film. Friedkin said, "There’s certain things you cannot act, like that sort of hurt."
Friedkin responded to this claim by saying that Burstyn was hurt, but he doesn't consider it an injury since she didn't take time off or file an insurance claim. "If I hadn't let the stuntman do that with the force that he did it, she would have had to do it over and over and over again," he claimed. "I would rather have had one [take] that risked hurting her a little, not injuring her."
16.This is less serious, but in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Viggo Mortensen broke two toes while kicking a helmet. His scream of anguish, followed by his fall to his knees, was real.
17.Malcolm McDowell was temporarily blinded after shooting the scene where his eyes are held open in A Clockwork Orange. "The lid locks kept sliding off my eyelids and scratching my cornea," he revealed. "When the anesthetic wore off, I was in such pain I was banging my head against a wall. But Stanley was mainly concerned about when he would be able to get his next shot." He actually went temporarily blind as a result. He then had to do it again for the close-ups. This is all seen in the final footage.
18.Sean Bean almost had his skull crushed while filming Sharpe's Regiment. "A horse landed on my head," he revealed. "They actually used that take. The bank collapsed, and the horse's hoof sort of sprung off my head as he was jumping. I got a bit of a black eye and a bit of a neck problem."
19.Finally, we'll end on a funny one. Michael McDonald insisted Melissa McCarthy throw an actual phone book in The Heat and said he would dodge it if it came near his face. But McCarthy ended up being positioned closer than he'd thought, and he didn't have time to dodge, meaning he was hit directly in the face. "Everyone, including Melissa and me, was thinking that my nose was broken," he revealed. "All I could think of was, 'Nobody break. Nobody laugh. Because I only want to do this once.'" Luckily, his nose was alright, though Melissa was soon injured as well: "She ran over so fast to see if I was all right that she slid on the phone book on the floor, and then everybody just ran to Melissa, of course." He joked, "I knew where I ranked."
