Sometimes TV actors find themselves in scenes that produce a very real fear response. From
dangerous stunts to jump scares that proved way too heart-jolting, these are TV scenes
that terrified actors in real life.
Signing up for Game of Thrones pretty much guarantees that you'll be trading blows and
blades eventually. That action component appealed to Iain Glen, who played Jorah Mormont, the
disgraced knight who transitioned from spying on Daenerys to becoming one of her most loyal
servants.
As Glen explained to Elle, he loves stage fighting, but he was intimidated by the scale
of Jorah's gladiatorial scene, which saw him take on multiple adversaries in the same hectic
sequence. He said:
"I was pretty fearful...When it's that extensive of a fight I was fighting various people with
different weapons things can happen. Accidents can happen."
Fortunately, everything worked out, and the scene became one of Glen's favorite memories
of working on the show. He told Entertainment Weekly:
"The whole gladiatorial sequence...It was a very hard week and I loved doing that. So
for the action side of things, that sequence encapsulated it."
"My little girl was there. You know, she watched her papa work. David said, 'Come sit here,
you can call it,' and she was like, 'Action!'"
While that may have been the scariest scene to shoot, a different one proved too much
to even watch. Glen admitted to Variety that he couldn't bring himself to watch Jorah fight
in the Battle of Winterfell because he was too emotionally invested in the character.
Breaking Bad never shied away from grizzly and tragic deaths, but there was one that
really shook up the cast and crew.
Krysten Ritter knew from the start that her character Jane had to die. But the scene where
it happened, in which Jane chokes on her own vomit after taking heroin, was rough for everyone
involved. Ritter said that during shooting, the crew struggled to watch the terrifyingly
authentic scene, and that she had to take breaks because it was too overwhelming. Her
mother can't even talk about it.
Another parent who struggled with the scene was Bryan Cranston. He said that as he was
watching Ritter pretending to choke, he suddenly saw his own daughter in her place, his worst
fear coming to life. It's the one scene from a very dark show that still makes him emotional.
Jane's death was also Aaron Paul's worst scene. His character Jesse tries to revive her, which
involved Paul pounding on Ritter's chest while she wore a special rig. Talking about the
scene in 2019, Paul said he and Ritter cried during shooting, adding:
"I just couldn't come back from it."
Usually, the only person safe from a jump scare-induced heart palpitation is the person
jumping out. But Victoria Pedretti is so good at playing a ghost that she even scared herself
in one especially heart-lurching scene.
In the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Pedretti plays Nell, one of the inhabitants
of the titular house, who survives the ghosts in her childhood home only to die when she
returns as an adult. Later on in the series, Nell's sisters get into an argument while
driving to the haunted mansion, and Nell's ghost bursts between their seats, shrieking
like, well, a very distraught ghost.
Pedretti told Decider that Nell wasn't trying to scare her sisters. As she explained:
"It came from a deeper place and a real need, so that's why it's so loud and immediate...I
knew it was happening [and] I screamed, at myself!"
But it still terrified everyone involved. Her co-star, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, confessed
that watching it got him, too, telling PopSugar:
"I watched [that episode] the other day, and I was so, so scared...[Nell] broke me!"
If you shudder when watching a character die in a spectacularly gruesome way, spare a thought
for the actor living the scene, especially when it comes to the cast of The Walking Dead.
The zombie show has delivered some of the most grisly deaths on TV, but maybe the most
shudder-inducing of all was watching Jeffrey Morgan's Negan stab Austin Nichols' Spencer
in broad daylight in season seven.
Nichols wasn't crazy about that moment, either. He was padded with a special chest plate and
a bag filled with fake blood and guts, but Morgan had to use a real razor to split open
the bag. The actor told Entertainment Weekly:
"I was afraid that he would puncture the chest plate and actually cut me because he comes
at me really hard and really fast."
Luckily, Morgan got it right in the first and only take.
While dying was scary, coming back as a zombie was all fun. Nichols revealed:
"It was cool to do...all this fun stuff with the zombie make-up and zombie contacts."
After his character's dramatic death was over, he said:
"I just stood up and started screaming. And I just started yelling 'YEAH! That was awesome!'"
Like everyone who isn't an aspiring medium, Gabourey Sidibe prefers her ghosts to be special
effects. But a supernatural experience made her think a real spirit showed up for one
scene in American Horror Story: Coven.
In episode 12, Sidibe's character, Queenie, recites a Latin spell to conjure an audience
with Papa Legba, the gatekeeper to the spirit world. During An Evening with the Women of
American Horror Story, Sidibe said that as she spoke the words, the light fixture above
her began to shake.
While shooting another part of the scene, the light fixture crashed to the floor, and
she felt a finger running up her chin to her bottom lip, which started to swell.
Sidibe and a makeup artist went to a trailer and started hearing scratching noises on the
walls outside. They only stopped when the makeup artist said a prayer and clapped her
hands. Completely freaked out, Sidibe refused to say the Latin summoning words again. But
she relented when the other actors struggled to get the hang of them. This time, her top
lip swelled up.
One of the first victims of the ever-growing Mindflayer in Stranger Things season three
was Heather the lifeguard, played by Francesca Reale. In a telepathic trance, Eleven finds
Heather in a bathtub full of ice, where she pleads for help before being dragged down
into the water by an unseen force.
Shooting the first half of the scene was creepy for Reale, who spent a day, quote, "drowning
[herself]" in the bathtub. And things only got scarier. For the part of the scene where
Heather is pulled underwater, Reale told CinemaBlend:
"Doing the drowning was actually in a pool with a black bottom, which was terrifying
for me because I hate any body of water that has a black bottom."
Adding to the waking nightmare, there was a mechanism attached to her foot which pulled
her down. She had to hold her arms above her head like she was reaching for Eleven and
scream, both without creating bubbles, while keeping her eyes open. Reale admitted that
it was, quote, "incredibly hard," but she said that she enjoyed the chance to do a stunt,
and she's game for more.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina leans much more heavily into occult practices than the
show's bright and bubbly predecessor. And despite playing powerful witch Prudence on
screen, Tati Gabrielle says she got chills when it came time to act out the resurrection
ritual in season one.
The ritual the group performs involves walking deep into a dense forest in the dark, standing
on a pentagram lit by candles, and chanting black magic spells to summon spirit hounds.
Fine for witches, but the atmosphere made for a spine-tingling shoot.
"As a student of necromancy, I strongly advise that you recite the text word for word. The
slightest deviation, we could all wind up dead."
Gabrielle confessed to Coupe De Main magazine:
"I was super terrified being out there at night, repeating these spells that are very
real spells and feeling like we're calling on these weird dark forces...We prayed before
we started the scene."
Because the show draws on real magical practices, Gabrielle worried that she might be messing
with actual spirits. She admitted to Collider:
"I get freaked out sometimes, when I go home at night, thinking that a demon is gonna be
lurking at the corner of my room."
Vampires aren't afraid of much, but the humans who play them have very real concerns. Natasia
Demetriou, who plays the vampire Nadja in the mockumentary series What We Do in the
Shadows, didn't feel so hot when a fire effect didn't go as planned.
"I just, ugh, ugh, you know, this. Not much scares me, but this. Ugh."
In a scene in the season one finale, three Staten Island vampires visit a church where
they slowly start to burn up. Demetriou's hands really were set on fire, and she wore
gloves covered in a special paste that's supposed to burn without damaging skin. But the fire
started getting out of control. She explained to Stuff:
"They thought I was just doing it as part of the scene. So it was like a good five seconds
of me thinking I was going to lose my hand."
Showrunner Jemaine Clement thought the accidental effect looked great. But Demetriou understandably
broke with her character under fire, admitting:
"I definitely ruined it by screaming, 'help, help' in my [English] accent."
Not all monsters are supernatural. Netflix's Mindhunter explores the FBI's early attempts
to understand what makes serial killers tick. Jonathan Groff plays hostage negotiator turned
serial killer investigator Holden Ford, who's based on real-life FBI agent John E. Douglas.
In the show, Ford forms a strange bond with real-life killer Ed Kemper, played to terrifying
effect by Cameron Britton.
At 6'9", Kemper was physically imposing, and he had a high IQ. He was chillingly eloquent
in his descriptions of the violent crimes he committed. Watching the real Kemper, or
Britton's version, describe his motivations is spine-tingling, especially if you're in
the room.
Director and producer David Fincher deliberately kept Britton apart from the rest of the cast,
to make their scenes even more intense. Groff admitted to Rolling Stone:
"To be sitting in this room with him in Los Angeles, all by myself, was terrifying."
In particular, Groff was freaked out by a scene in the season one finale where Kemper
hugs Ford. Groff told Esquire that when he was just reading the scene with Britton:
"The hair stood up on the back of my neck. That final scene was easy to act because he
is truly terrifying."
Excessively creepy clowns have become a scourge of movies and TV in the last few years, and
two of the more famous clown trendsetters are American Horror Story: Freak Show's Twisty
and his accomplice, Dandy, who burst onto our screens in 2014.
These clowns even scared Horror Story veteran Emma Roberts. She had nightmares when shooting
the show, and when she saw Twisty, her perfectly normal response was:
"He's going to chase me through a forest at 4 AM in the middle of nowhere? I don't, I
don't think so."
In fact, Roberts' character, Maggie, isn't chased through a forest by Twisty. Instead,
it's Dandy, who's wearing a different but also horrifying clown costume. It didn't take
much acting to get that scene right.
"You get this adrenaline of fear where you're like, 'Oh my god, I know it's fake but he's
right behind me and it's really scary!'"
True Blood's Tara Thornton went through a lot in her relatively short life. But the
scariest scene for actress Rutina Wesley was the one in which Sookie and Lafayette bury
Tara, hoping to bring her back as a vampire after she was killed saving Sookie.
Tara is dead in the scene, but Wesley definitely wasn't. And like anyone with a pulse, she
didn't enjoy being buried alive. In fact, she nearly had a panic attack. But since dead
people can't breathe, much less hyperventilate, she had to stay as still as possible. She
explained to Flare:
"I remember my heart was beating so fast...It took all my focus to not move an inch when
the final shovel of dirt was thrown on my face. I think I might have actually inhaled
some dirt that day."
Although it was terrifying at the time, Wesley later admitted to Vulture:
"It turned out to be a beautiful shot. That's how you get it, you do it for real."
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