Curious about actors who got seriously injured while filming your favorite shows and films? Ever
heard of “Mission: Impossible” or the “Matrix?” Keep watching to find out all the details.
Daryl Dixon might be the biggest badass in the apocalypse,
but according to what Norman Reedus told People's Choice, that's not really him at all.
Asked just how well he'd fare in a real zombie apocalypse, he said,
"I mean, I'm kind of a wimp."
His self-proclaimed difficulties in the bravado department aren't reflected in
his dedication to making it look good on screen, though. In fact,
Reedus has managed to accrue an impressive list of injuries while filming "The Walking Dead."
“Yes, Ma’am.”
He's gotten a few black eyes, and some of them came from his trademark crossbow. He explained,
"I was running through a corridor with my crossbow, and I hit it on the door frame,
and it hit me in the face and gave me a black eye. Twice."
That was in Season 5, the same season he sliced his arm open. He told The Wrap that his favorite
scene was one where the survivors barricade a barn door to keep the walkers out. Unfortunately,
it's the same scene where he sliced open his arm so badly that his co-stars said they saw
blood start pouring out of it. It was caught on camera, but didn't make it into the show.
He's also gotten injured off-set,
when he sliced his hand open on a vending machine. He said to Entertainment Weekly,
"Why am I always getting hurt? I get hurt all the time. I feel like I should have,
like, football pads on at all times, even when I'm just walking around."
Some shows seem to lend themselves to endangering their cast and crew more than others,
and "The Good Wife" isn't likely to be on anyone's list of potentially deadly shows.
But in 2012, Kristin Chenoweth suffered a host of injuries that forced her to leave
the show and concentrate on her recovery and physical therapy. This was due to a piece of
the overhead lighting rig falling on her in what People described as a freak accident.
Her list of injuries is nothing short of terrifying, and when she was rushed to
Bellevue Hospital in New York City, they found she had a 5-inch skull fracture.
Over the next few years she found that more and more medical issues with her ribs,
hips, and neck started to develop. She said that immediately after the accident,
she had difficulties putting sentences together, and that she has continued troubles with
multitasking. She was still feeling the effects from the incident in 2016, telling People,
"I'm getting along so good, but for example, about three weeks ago I found out I have three cracked
teeth from the accident. It's an ongoing recovery and it's not going to be fast."
When she appeared at the Toast To Survivors Luncheon for Breast Cancer Awareness Month,
she said her mother had flown out to help her during her recovery.
Chenoweth shared a conversation with her mother, explaining,
"I said, 'Why me, why me, why me, why me?' and she said,
'Why not you? You're human like everyone else. Things happen.'"
When Jim Caviezel auditioned for "The Passion of the Christ," he didn’t know
important details about the film, according to Fox News. He says that he had no doubt he
was going to accept Mel Gibson's offer to play Jesus in the film. Even so, no one would blame
him if he had turned it down, knowing the risk of injuries he might sustain during filming.
The role required being on the receiving end of some understandably brutal beatings and
torture scenes. Along the way, Caviezel came down with a lung infection and pneumonia,
developed a skin infection and headaches from the makeup, fought off hypothermia,
and dislocated his shoulder. However, all of those injuries were just a warmup for what
happened while they were filming the Sermon on the Mount. Caviezel explained the terrifying ordeal,
"We were preparing to shoot the Sermon on the Mount and three seconds before,
I was hit by lightning. I knew it was going to happen. People started screaming and they said
I had fire on both sides of my head and a light around me. [...] It was a sickening feeling."
The BBC reported that the lightning strike not only hit Caviezel,
it also jumped to assistant director Jan Michelini. It was the second time Michelini
had been struck by lightning during filming, and neither resulted in serious injury. Wow.
There's absolutely no one that could play Wolverine like Hugh Jackman,
and not many people would be willing to take the damage he has, either.
[snarls and grunts]
When asked by Entertainment Weekly about how long it took him to get used
to wearing Wolverine's famous claws, the answer was a roundabout admission that he
never really did. The claws were very real, and Jackman called them "killing machines."
He apparently had given himself some scars from the claws, too, explaining,
"I'm a bit of a klutz. I used to have to practice so that I wouldn't hit people,
and the one thing I of course neglected to practice was the
follow-through[.] […] I've got a number of scars on my thighs, and it's really not cool."
Not just a danger to himself, he also stabbed Mystique's stunt double,
and was a bit taken aback when she was thrilled about her badge of honor.
“Sorry.”
Kevin Rushton is the stuntman who went head-to-head with Wolverine in a cage fight
for his first big on-screen performance. He talked with The Hollywood Reporter about just how real
those fight scenes ended up being. Jackman didn't have a stuntman himself, and Rushton said that
by the time they were done filming, their hands were swollen to, quote, "the size of balloons."
Jackman doesn't just hurt himself in front of cameras, either. In 2010, he was live in
front of 6,000 people when a zip line stunt went wrong. Instead of flying gracefully onto
the stage on "Oprah," The Telegraph reported that he forgot to brake and crashed into a light rig.
After being hoisted down and bandaged up, he came back and joked that one of the other guests,
U2's Bono, was supposed to have done the stunt, but that they couldn't afford the insurance.
Rose Leslie is perhaps best known for her role as Ygritte in "Game of Thrones." While it seems
logical that there would have been at least a few injuries — or at least some bruises — during her
time on set, it wasn't during the fantasy epic that she got hurt. Leslie told E! that she had
completely escaped being hurt at all during "Game of Thrones." Instead, she broke her
toe filming "The Good Fight," a spinoff of "The Good Wife." She said of the incident,
"This was purely down to me. This was my, kind of like,
ignorance, in thinking that I could turn and pivot on a little dime.
Of course, when I attempted it on camera, I then completely whacked it into a table."
She went on to add that at least if she'd fallen in "Game of Thrones," she
would have had an excuse. Instead, this gave her a lesson in irony.
In 1996, Lucy Lawless was on top of the world — and climbing to the top of the television ratings,
too, with "Xena: Warrior Princess." By the second season, however, the cast and
crew were put to the test when they were sent scrambling to figure out a way to work around
an injury so bad that Lawless wasn't just unable to fight, she needed to learn how to walk again.
While filming a skit for "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," she fell off her horse and
fractured her pelvis in several places. When she spoke with the Los Angeles Times in the
March following the accident, she was already up, walking, kicking, and ready to get back in
the saddle. While she credited a tough upbringing with teaching her how to fight and how not to cry,
she also said that the accident left its mark in more than just a physical way, explaining,
"I'm ready to get back on the horse. There's no medical reason why I can't.
It's just psychological now. I don't think I'll ever get on a horse again without thinking of
Christopher Reeve. See, I won't ski for that reason. I don't want to hurt myself and let
people down, but I can't not do everything, so I'm going to get back on that horse. It's
important for me to give myself that challenge. Otherwise, I'm forever going to be frightened."
Halle Berry's injury shut down filming on "Gothika" for a week, the BBC reported in 2003.
The official statement included few details, and simply said that her broken arm occurred
while filming a scene that wasn't even particularly a stunt scene. All we’re told
is that it had been an accident where her arm didn't go the way it was supposed to.
In 2012, though, The Movie Network talked to a source who suggested there was more to it than
that. Even more, apparently Berry hadn't forgiven the actor who had been holding onto her when he
arm broke: Robert Downey, Jr. According to their source, she felt that he hadn't sufficiently
apologized for the incident — which he said was a complete accident — and still tends to avoid him.
There are few films that capture the heart of a cult classic quite like "Evil Dead."
It's impossible to forget that it’s a movie where the entire thing was essentially a group
of friends just goofing around and having a good time. One of the long-standing rumors is that
Bruce Campbell actually had his jaw broken when they were filming the original movie,
though according to him, it's absolutely not true. He told a crowd at Dallas Comic Con,
"I love the fact that people still believe that."
He was, however, injured for real while filming "Ash vs. Evil Dead." According
to what he told Entertainment Weekly just before the season finale debuted,
he had blown out his hamstring two weeks before shooting wrapped.
"If you've ever blown a hamstring, you know they call it hamstrung for a reason. You can't
walk. So, to do fight scenes for two weeks when you can't walk — now you're living the dream!"
“Groovy.”
The 1981 movie "Roar" hit select theaters again in 2015 for a limited release. Yes,
the film that put its cast and crew alongside a supporting cast of 132 animals,
including lions, tigers, and a 10,000-pound elephant. In fact, Entertainment Weekly
took another look at just what went on behind the scenes and it’s quite bizarre.
One of the child stars, John Marshall, told the publication,
"In hindsight, I know how stupid it was to do this film. I am amazed no one died."
He also said that the oft-repeated statistic that 70 people were injured
during filming was a little off, and that it was actually 72 people.
Among those people was Tippi Hedren, who rose to fame in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" and found
her calling hoping to raise awareness about the conservation of the world's big cats. By the end
of shooting, IndieWire reported she had weathered her way through scalp wounds and a broken leg
that had been crushed by the elephant and went gangrenous. Another star, Melanie Griffith, was
mauled so badly she needed facial reconstruction surgery to fix the damage. Theirs weren't the
only horrible injuries, either: cinematographer Jan de Bont was scalped and needed 120 stitches.
Sometimes, actors will go to extremes for a role, and Vincent D'Onofrio has turned extremes into an
art form. After being cast in "Full Metal Jacket," he rushed to gain 70 pounds for the part. Going
from fit and athletic to putting on that much weight in that amount of time did some damage,
and in a 1987 interview for The New York Times, he talked a bit about what it did to him.
The change was so drastic that he found himself having trouble doing even the most mundane of
tasks, like tying his shoes. When it came to shooting the scenes where the Marine recruits
were going through boot camp, it was as physically grueling in real life as it looked on screen.
During the filming of one of the obstacle courses, D'Onofrio blew his knee out so badly he needed to
have surgical reconstruction done. Even so, a year later, he was back to running six miles a day.
In August 2004, People reported that Charlize Theron had been injured on the set of her new
film, "Aeon Flux." At the time, they didn't know how serious the injury was,
and reported that the role had required all sorts of specialized training in gymnastics.
It only came out later that she had been incredibly close to being paralyzed.
The stunt in question had been a backflip, which she had to do while wearing platform
shoes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she slipped, fell, and landed on her neck.
The fall herniated a disc near her spinal cord, and production stopped for eight weeks.
Originally, doctors had suspected she might be at least partially paralyzed, and while she was back
at work surprisingly quick, she later said she'd learned a valuable lesson. she told Total Film,
"Now I know there's a time and a place. You have to be smart about it
and I've definitely come to a place in my career where I would be the first to say,
without feeling guilty or not badass enough, 'You know what? I don't need to do this.'
It's wise because I felt guilty for shutting down production 10 days into shooting for eight weeks."
Brad Pitt had a plethora of memorable roles in the 1990s,
but his work playing Detective Mills in "Seven" proved to be one of the best of his career.
“What’s in the box!?”
He's known for giving his all during a performance, though that professionalism
caused him some serious pain and injury while filming "Seven." During a chase scene,
Pitt was running when he skidded on a car hood and his hand broke through the windshield.
When the glass shattered, a shard severed a tendon in his hand. The actor had to be rushed
to the hospital, where the docs stitched him up. While the injury wasn't minor,
it didn't keep Pitt from working — though some changes to the script had to be made.
Because he injured his tendon, he had to wear a cast to keep his hand immobile,
something that couldn't be easily covered by makeup or some costume trickery.
It would have been impractical to hold off filming Pitt's scenes for too long,
so the writers were forced to incorporate the injury into the story. That's why Detective Mills'
arm is in a cast throughout much of the movie. Because films are rarely shot in order, Pitt had
to hide his arm as much as possible while filming parts that came earlier in the story. He did
this remarkably well, because it's impossible to tell he's wearing a cast in any of those scenes.
Ruby Rose surprised fans when she quit "Batwoman" after the first season,
leaving many to wonder what caused her to walk away. Eventually,
it was revealed that she suffered a lot of injuries while filming, as her role required
numerous stunts and fight choreography, which many believed led to her departure.
Rose was initially quiet about what happened,
but she later explained more in an Instagram post. She wrote, in part:
"A couple of months ago, I was told I needed an emergency surgery or I
was risking becoming paralyzed[.] [...] I had herniated two disks doing stunts,
and they were close to severing my spinal cord."
Rose included a truncated video of her surgery in the post, explaining that she
had it filmed because she wanted to see what happened after she was anesthetized.
Despite this news, Rose didn't officially explain her departure from "Batwoman" until an
October 2020 interview on "The Jess Cagle Show" on SiriusXM. She said that the injury made working on
the show tricky, and the COVID-19 pandemic didn't help. Rose said that she put a lot of thought and
reflection into her position on the series. She also said that she and the production team, quote,
"mutually agreed" that her departure was best for the show. The actor has since changed her tune,
however. She posted a series of Instagram Stories in October 2021 alleging that she didn't quit,
but instead left over unsafe working conditions and, quote, "bullying tactics."
Jennifer Lawrence has been injured on movie sets throughout her career, each with different
levels of severity. Most recently, a glass explosion resulted in some shrapnel hitting
her right eyelid on the set of "Don't Look Up." Fortunately, since the glass missed her eye, she
returned to work soon after the accident, though filming was halted for the rest of the night.
While an eye laceration may seem scary, that wasn't as bad as what happened to
her on "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" set. There, she suffered significant hearing loss.
Lawrence described what happened while doing a Google+ Hangout with co-stars Josh Hutcherson,
Liam Hemsworth, and "Catching Fire" director Francis Lawrence. She said,
"I went deaf in one ear for two and a half weeks.
I had a double ear infection because I had to keep diving into the water."
She further explained to E! News that jets of water punctured her eardrum.
Lawrence also elaborated on her ear-splitting experience in an interview with Vanity Fair,
explaining that she went deaf in one ear for months,
which is a bit longer than the time period she mentioned previously. Fortunately,
the hearing loss diminished after some time, and her hearing is back to 100%.
Lawrence's on-set accidents tend to sound worse than they are,
especially when it comes to "Mother!" While filming that movie, she tore her
diaphragm for hyperventilating. Thankfully, Lawrence recovered from that injury as well.
While filming "Halloween Kills," Kyle Richards broke her nose. She told ET,
“[I was] working with a stunt coordinator to do a fight scene with Michael Myers[.] [...] Something
flew back and hit me in the face and I knew immediately that something was wrong."
Richards told Us Weekly that she didn't know her nose was broken when it happened.
She knew she had injured herself, but she didn't tell anyone, as she explained,
"I didn't want the stunt double to step in and have them be like,
'Oh Kyle, you know, let the stunt double handle this.'"
She took some Advil and got back to work. It wasn't until she returned to Los Angeles that
the severity of her injury became clear. Her makeup artist noticed something immediately,
telling Richards that she had, quote, "a bone poking out." Richards thought the lack of blood
meant the injury wasn't that bad, but she went to the doctor anyway, who set her nose right.
That wasn't the only on-set mishap Richards has had, either. She was also hurt while
filming "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" when she walked into a beehive.
It’s important to note that Richards is extremely allergic to bees! She explained on her Instagram
Stories that her family wasn't home and none of her employees heard her, although that was
just the beginning of her problems. Her landline wouldn't dial 911, and her epi-pen was defective.
Richards survived the incident, but she had to spend some time in the hospital to recover.
Tom Cruise is one of the most devoted actors in the world, and he's insistent on doing
all of his own stunts whenever possible. The man learned how to fly a helicopter
just so he could do so in a movie, and he scaled the tallest building in the world,
the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Most of his more impressive stunt work occurred while filming
one of his many "Mission: Impossible" films, but that's also when he injured himself.
While shooting a rooftop chase scene for "Mission: Impossible – Fallout,"
the sixth film in the franchise, Cruise literally jumped from one building to another.
The scene was shot in London, and the take when he was injured mostly made it into
the final cut of the film. He explained what happened during an appearance on "The Graham
Norton Show," alongside co-stars Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Henry Cavill. He said,
"I'm chasing after Henry[.] [...] I hit the side of the wall and climb up on the wall. [...] I
didn't want to do it again. I knew instantly [my ankle] was broken. [...] [I] run past camera,
we got the shot. [...] I said, 'Sorry guys, it's broken, take me to the hospital.'"
“It’s not fully healed, but we’re shooting.”
The Hollywood Reporter reported that Cruise did indeed break his ankle when he hit the wall, which
caused filming to go on hiatus while he recovered. Fortunately, the premiere wasn't delayed.
"The Matrix" was a groundbreaking film that required a great many practical stunts.
It also employed a ton of martial arts choreography, which put the cast through
the wringer. There were numerous injuries in pre-production and while filming, which impacted
pretty much everyone involved in the film. A Guardian interview with the cast and directors
revealed how extensively everyone was hurt. Hugo Weaving's injury required
him to have surgery. Laurence Fishburne was hit in the head and suffered a cut to his eyelid,
and Carrie-Anne Moss hurt her ankle. The ankle injury happened early in the production process,
but the actor kept it a secret and worked through the pain.
She didn't reveal what happened until the end of production because she was
worried about being replaced. This was at a time when Moss was unknown,
and "The Matrix" became her breakout role, so her concerns may have been valid. However,
that wasn't the end of her "Matrix" injuries, as she was also hurt while filming "The Matrix:
Revolutions." While rehearsing a scene, Moss was injured even more severely. She explained to IGN,
"I broke my leg on a wire. I broke my leg the first week of training.
It was a challenge to overcome right off the bat."
Moss eventually recovered and returned to filming, shooting both sequels back to back.
She also returned nearly two decades later for "The Matrix: Resurrections."
Fortunately, there were no reported injuries for her on the set of that film.
Movie stunts are carefully orchestrated to ensure nobody is injured,
but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. While filming "Rocky IV,"
Stallone reportedly decided he wanted to make Rocky's fight against Ivan Drago appear as real
as possible. So he asked Dolph Lundgren to do something a little different than what
they'd originally planned. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Stallone told Lundgren,
"Just go out there and try to clock me.
For the first minute of the fight, it is going to be a free-for-all."
Stallone took his hits, though later that night he felt off so he went to the hospital. He said,
"Dolph Lundgren put me in the hospital for nine days.
I knew I was in trouble when I showed up and nuns met you at the ICU."
Later, Stallone looked at the footage and determined that an uppercut caused the injury,
as the punch caught his ribs and struck his heart against his ribcage.
“No pain.”
The injury was consistent with damage found in head-on collisions.
Stallone joked that he did hit a bus, of sorts. Lundgren explained in a separate
interview that he got a two-week vacation after the incident because, as his producer put it,
"Sly's in the hospital."
Stallone has been injured making movies before, but "Rocky IV" nearly killed him.
Jennifer Garner shot to superstardom when she landed the lead role on "Alias." From there,
she continued working in stunt-heavy roles, including playing Elektra Natchios on
"Daredevil" and her own spinoff, "Elektra." Since Garner is no stranger to dangerous stunt work,
she — like many others in her profession — has been injured while filming.
In January 2005, Entertainment Weekly reported that Garner suffered nerve damage
to her back as a result of filming a stunt for an episode of "Alias."
This injury kept her from fulfilling all of her promotional obligations for "Elektra" and made
her unable to host an episode of "Saturday Night Live," which would have helped promote the film.
The extent of Garner's nerve damage has never been revealed, and it isn't clear if
she’s still facing complications from it. Though Garner's on-set injury sidelined her for a bit,
she got back to filming "Alias" soon after, potentially pointing to a full recovery.
Garner's injuries aren't always related to things happening while filming, either. In 2018,
she injured her foot while wearing high heels. Although doesn't have anything to do with filming,
her treatment for the pain so that she could go to the gym was inventive. She posted a video on
Instagram where she dunked her feet in a bucket of ice for 30 seconds, making them numb. It must have
worked because she managed to make it to the gym, proving she knows how to work through the pain.
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