Stunt performers have been around since the days of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,
but they were really in demand when moviegoers acquired a taste for high-octane action that
came later in the form of Wild West films.
Not every actor could gallop at high speed while shooting at foes.
While these days all kinds of safety mechanisms are there to make sure things run smoothly,
being a stunt double is still a very dangerous occupation.
Wages vary, but the Screen Actors Guild tells us stunt doubles should get at least $859
a day.
That said, Colin Follenweider, sometimes called Hollywood’s favorite stuntman, will get
the big bucks for being Spider-Man for a while.
“Ultimately, we're expendable where the lead in a film isn't,” he once said.
Let’s now look at when things turned bad, in this episode of the Infographics Show,
Movie stunts that went horribly wrong.
15.
A Hangover tragedy Australian stuntman Scott McLean almost didn’t
survive the making of the movie Hangover II in 2011.
While filming in Bangkok, Thailand, he was doing a simple stunt that meant putting his
head out of a car window while the car was traveling at high speed.
It sounds simple enough, but something went wrong, and his head hit an oncoming truck.
This left him in a coma for six weeks with some serious brain trauma.
He left a Thai hospital and then underwent eight months of rehabilitation in Australia.
After that, he needed constant care.
He blamed the stunt coordinator for the accident, but it seems Warner Brothers didn’t pay
for all of his medical bills.
For that, McLean’s partner said in 2013 that she was “disappointed, upset and disgusted.”
14.
Horror on the Resident Evil Set A horrific accident happened to stuntwoman
Olivia Jackson while the movie Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was being filmed in 2015.
She was riding a motorbike at high speed down a road.
A crane above her was supposed to lower down, and the camera would film her as she rode.
But that crane came way too close, and she hit it full on.
Her face was degloved, her lung was punctured, and she had to be put into an induced coma.
Not only that, her injuries left her with an amputated arm and a twisted back.
She survived, but some months later tweeted, “I don't mean to moan, but sometimes I just
want to crawl out of my own skin & all the pains in it.”
She seemed to face her injuries with bravery and was at least better off than another crew
member who was crushed to death by a Hummer while making the same movie.
We think now you’re starting to see what a dangerous occupation this can be, and you’ll
also see how it can get even worse.
13.
The dark side of magic movies A stuntman, David Holmes, was playing the
stunt double for none other than Daniel Radcliffe in the Harry Potter franchise.
The movie was Deathly Hallows.
The stuntman was tied to a harness flying through the air, and at one point he was jerked
back.
This was all part of the show, except he was pulled back too fast and ended up being slammed
against a wall.
He broke his neck and has since been paralyzed from his chest down.
He does have the use of his arms, though.
Six years later, he was interviewed at age 31 about how much he was enjoying living in
the house that he had especially designed for himself and his disability.
Believe it or not, he was very positive about life.
“Breaking my neck has made me 10 times more creative.
My brain is still moving as fast as my body wanted to,” he said.
12.
The dangers of James Bond As you can imagine, there have been plenty
of accidents over the years while filming the James Bond movies.
The worst accident happened during the making of the 1981 movie For Your Eyes Only.
During a bobsled chase, one of the sleds turned upside down and trapped a young man called
Paolo Rignon underneath it.
Unfortunately, he did not survive.
11.
They really are expendable This tragedy happened during the filming of
Expendables II in 2011.
During the making of the movie on Lake Ognyanovo in Bulgaria, there was a scene with an explosion.
Two stuntmen were injured during that explosion.
Their names were Kun Lieu and Nuo Sun.
Lieu, who was acting as Jet Li’s stunt double, died from his injuries, while Sun survived.
Lieu’s parents sued over their son’s death, and some years later it was reported that
Jet Li donated $750,000 to the Lieu family.
10.
A bad landing Stuntman Jack Tyree met the same fate of death
during the making of the 1982 movie The Sword and the Sorcerer.
He jumped off a cliff, and it was intended he would land on an airbag.
Unfortunately, he missed the airbag by a few feet and died from his injuries.
The stunt was actually left in the movie, and it was dedicated to him.
9.
The death of a pilot Art Scholl was famed for flying planes acrobatically.
You might have seen Scholl’s high-flying tricks in the movie Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom, and he was also one of the stunt pilots for the famous movie Top Gun.
It’s said he went into an inverted spin during the filming of Top Gun in 1985 and
lost control of the plane.
His last words were “I've got a problem here.”
That he did, and he hit the ocean at high speed.
The plane exploded on impact, and the man’s remains were never found.
No one knows exactly what happened.
“Something mechanical must have happened,” said another pilot.
“An inverted flat spin was nothing for him.
He's done so many of those.”
8.
Zombie catastrophe If you are not familiar with those old movies,
we imagine you have heard of the show The Walking Dead.
During filming in 2017, stuntman John Bernecker was supposed to fall from a balcony, which
is something you see in many, many movies.
This time things didn’t go as planned.
He was supposed to fall onto a mat, but he missed it after trying to grab a rail and
fell right onto the concrete floor.
He was rushed to the hospital and died soon after.
That particular scene involved a fight with actor Austin Amelio.
He later said, “I have no words.
My heart is absolutely broken from John Bernecker.”
It must be an awful thing to be pretending to fight and then see your stuntman hit the
floor.
7.
Deadpool disaster This tragedy occurred during the making of
the recent superhero spoof movie Deadpool II.
The victim was stuntwoman Joi 'SJ' Harris, and she was the stunt double for actress Zazie
Beetz, who played Domino.
Harris, who was a formidable motorcyclist, had done the stunt perfectly four times.
But it seems on the fifth take she lost control of her bike and hit a building, being sent
right through a window.
In a statement, director David Leitch said, “No words can express how I and the rest
of the Deadpool 2 crew feel about this tragedy.
Our thoughts are with her family, friends and loved ones in this difficult time.”
6.
More tragedy in the Lee family This stunt that went wrong actually involved
an actor.
That actor was the son of Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee.
In 1993, he was making the film The Crow, and the scene involved him walking into a
room to see his girlfriend being raped by a bunch of thugs.
Lee is shot in the film with a .44 Magnum revolver, except the bullets were not supposed
to be real.
Blanks are used, of course.
However, as Snopes writes, there was a problem with one of the blanks used in this scene:
“Unfortunately, a fragment of a dummy bullet, used earlier in close-up shots, was lodged
in the barrel, and the blank charge propelled the fragment into Lee’s side, fatally wounding
him.”
5.
More Crow darkness Unbelievably, death struck again during the
making of another Crow movie.
This time it was 1999’s The Crow: Stairway to Heaven.
Canadian actor Marc Akerstream was hit by flying debris during an explosion scene.
4.
Too many X’s This tragic event happened during the filming
of the 2002 movie XXX.
During the filming, there was a scene in which stuntman and former Navy SEAL Harry O’Connor
was being pulled at a very high speed on a paraglider.
Unfortunately, he got pulled right into a bridge and didn’t survive.
3.
Beijing blaze During the filming of John Woo’s 2009 epic
film Red Cliff, there was a scene in which a small boat hits a large ancient ship, and
there was a massive explosion and subsequent fire.
A fire there was, and unfortunately quite a few crew members were actually trapped in
it.
One of them died, a young man by the name of Lu Yanqing.
He burned to death in the blaze.
The set was just outside of Beijing in a place called Xiaotang Shan.
According to Reuters, the reason why the fire got out of hand was because that day there
were very strong winds.
2.
All too real This tragedy is strange because it happened
during the making of a BBC TV series called 999 in which stuntmen portrayed people having
lucky escapes.
The irony was, of course, that one reenacted lucky escape didn’t involve a lucky escape.
An English stuntman called Tip Tipping, a former Royal Marine and SAS soldier, died
in a scene in which he was parachuting.
Another Bad Landing A tragic accident occurred on the set of a
film called Vampire in Brooklyn, which was supposed to be a kind of spoof horror-comedy.
It starred Eddie Murphy and was released in 1995.
A stuntwoman called Sonja Davis died while falling backwards 42 feet (13 meters) during
the making of this film.
Davis’s mother used to turn up on the set quite often and watch her daughter perform.
After the accident, she told the LA Times, “The last words I heard my baby say was
when she yelled down to the stunt coordinator, 'Are you sure?'
I could feel Sonja wasn't comfortable with the stunt.”
A terrible thing happened in that the air cushion that was meant to save the stuntwoman
did the opposite.
Instead of cushioning her fall, it acted like a trampoline and sent her flying into the
air.
She hit a building and then landed on the floor.
She spent 13 days in a coma and eventually succumbed to her injuries.
Maybe Davis had a premonition because her mother told the LA Times, “She asked them
three times (as she stood on top of the building before the stunt) if they were sure it was
OK,” the mother said.
“I could feel her lack of confidence and then she paused.”
Okay, so that’s probably about as bad as it gets.
In Sonja Davis’s case, it seems the death definitely could have been avoided.
In fact, it seems in most of these cases death could have been averted if the crew had been
more careful.
After hearing these stories, would you take up this profession?
Let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Luckiest Unlucky Man In The World.
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See you next time!