It's easy to forget that there's a fair amount of danger that goes with making all that Hollywood
magic happen. Here's a look at a few times when it all went wrong.
Being a Hollywood action hero can be difficult and dangerous work. But don't take our word
for it. Just ask the legendary Sylvester Stallone, whose blockbuster action thriller filmography
has put him in real-life harm's way on more than one occasion. Sly required surgeries
after filming two of The Expendables movies and broke multiple ribs during a stunt as
Rambo in First Blood.
Those were just flesh wounds compared to Stallone's scariest and most life-threatening on-set
injury, however. While filming the fourth installment in his long-running Rocky saga,
Stallone bravely -- or, maybe foolishly — insisted on actually sparring with his castmate Dolph
Lundgren, who played the villainous Ivan Drago. Lundgren isn't a bad guy in real life, but
he obliged, hitting Stallone so hard that his heart swelled, resulting in a hospital
stay.
The 2013 crime caper Now You See Me packs a ton of astonishing visuals into its two-hour
runtime, with many of them relying on the magic of CGI. You'd think that utilizing computer
graphics would mean the actors never really had to get in harm's way, but that wasn't
quite the case.
One of the stage performances had Isla Fisher's character Henley drop, handcuffed, into a
giant water tank so she could escape in front of a cheering crowd. Her chain gets stuck,
but moments from death, she escapes in the knick of time. It's a dramatic scene… only
in real life, the drama wasn't entirely fake. Just like her character in the movie, Fisher
got trapped in the water tank, thanks to a stuck chain. The actress spent almost three
full minutes struggling to get out.
"And I was banging, you to know set me free, but everyone just thought I was doing fabulous
acting. Thought I was being Meryl Streep in the tank, actually I was drowning."
The Back to the Future movies are known for laugh-out-loud comedy and time-traveling shenanigans,
but not necessarily their death-defying stunts. Maybe that's why franchise star Michael J.
Fox felt safe performing his own during a key sequence in the Wild West-set Back to
the Future III, forgoing the use of a stand-in during a scene in which his character, Marty
McFly, is hanged by Mad Dog Tannen and his posse.
While Fox would generally protect his throat with his hands during rehearsals, they didn't
seem to help during actual filming, and the actor was asphyxiated and lost consciousness
during the actual filming of the scene. Fortunately for Fox and audiences everywhere, the crew
eventually jumped in and saved him, averting a real-life crisis when they realized that
he wasn't just acting.
"Great Scott!"
Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn has played some harrowing roles in her career, but few of
them came with the level of intensity she experienced on the set of 1973's The Exorcist.
As Chris MacNeil, the mother of demon-possessed Regan, Burstyn went all out in portraying
the horror her character experienced during her daughter's progression from a doe-eyed
schoolgirl to the potty-mouthed pawn of Satan. But director William Friedkin wasn't always
sold on her performance, so he took measures to make sure things got as real as possible...
measures that included giving Burstyn permanent spinal damage.
During the infamous scene when Regan slaps her mother across the room, Burstyn was tied
to a cable that yanked her to the floor. After multiple takes, Friedkin told the guy pulling
the cable to just yank the hell out of it for the next one. He did, slamming Burstyn
against the floor so hard that she reportedly broke her tailbone and spent years dealing
with the injury. That take — and Burstyn's real cry of pain — made it into the final
cut.
The 1995 movie Se7en is an incredibly intense film experience, from start to finish. But
one of its most harrowing sequences takes place when Brad Pitt's character, Mills, chases
John Doe out of his apartment building. The scene has Mills fall off a fire escape onto
his arm, before getting whacked in the same arm by a crowbar.
It makes sense when Mills shows up with a cast on his arm later in the movie. But what
most moviegoers didn't know was that the cast was real. While filming that scene, Pitt had
to leap across the rain-slicked hoods of moving cars. According to reports, he slipped on
one of them and smashed through the windshield, slicing through one of the tendons in his
arm. Considering how much worse the accident could have been, an armful of stitches probably
didn't seem that bad.
The Wizard of Oz dazzled moviegoers in 1939 with its technicolor vision of Oz, but not
all of the actors escaped that movie magic unscathed. Margaret Hamilton, who played the
Wicked Witch of the West, came away with the worst of it after a stunt left her with third-degree
burns.
"Well, my little pretty. I can cause accidents too!"
During the scene in which the Wicked West interrupts the festivities in Munchkin Country,
Hamilton makes a dramatic exit by disappearing in a cloud of fire and smoke. The trick was,
she fell through a trapdoor in the set that was hidden by a plume of smoke, and once she
was safely out of harm's way, a jet of flame completed the effect for the camera. In one
take, however, the trapdoor didn't open when it was supposed to, and Hamilton got caught
in the pyrotechnic flamethrower, which severely burned her hands and face. In that big black
witch's robe, it's a miracle she didn't completely catch on fire.
As countless filmmakers have learned the hard way, making movies in or around water can
be incredibly difficult. For the cast of 1989's The Abyss, which tells the story of a crew
that finds more than they bargained for when they try to recover a sunken submarine, things
were particularly tough. Star Ed Harris nearly drowned while filming one sequence when he
waited until the last minute to ask for air — and then had to wait an extra couple of
white-knuckle seconds while an upside-down regulator was refitted. The actor told The
New York Times:
"Once, the regulator was put in upside down so that one-half of what was going into my
lungs was water. For a brief second, I thought, 'This is it' [...] then I was mad at myself
for feeling that panic."
Harris should have taken it a little easier on himself. It's hard to imagine anyone not
panicking when they're seconds away from drowning.
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