Amanda Mannen
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For a profession that mostly involves sitting around looking pretty, acting can sometimes be pretty dangerous. Like when directors go nuts and start choking you, or when your co-stars head butt mirrors when they're only supposed to pretend to, or when the props themselves attack and break your toes.
And sometimes it's not even that cool. Sometimes, actors get injured doing the simplest things imaginable. Like when...
Apologies if this ruins the movie magic for you, but since the amount of cocaine snorted in your average mobster movie would triple its budget, the drugs are usually fake. In the past, prop masters usually used powdered milk, but these days, it's mostly vitamin B or D powder, which is both easier on the vocal chords and presumably lower calorie -- it's hard to play a junkie if you're all milk-fattened. It even gives you a little energy boost, so acting is barely required. It's not without its drawbacks though, as Jonah Hill discovered on the set of The Wolf of Wall Street.
Paramount PicturesYou start talking way too fast about nutritional supplements, for one.
After "doing fake coke for, like, seven months, every day," Hill got a pretty bad case of bronchitis. As he explains it, "If you ingest any matter, that much matter, into your lungs, you will get very sick." It got so bad that he eventually had to be hospitalized, spending three weeks off the set, in what was effectively fake drug rehab.
Paramount PicturesWe could have used a three-week break about halfway through this movie too.
Let's say you're a competent and morally upstanding director. You're filming a big chase scene when your leading man slips on top of a car and accidentally punches a windshield, the big, beautiful dummy. Now his hand is all messed up. What do you do? Put shooting on hold while he heals? Of course, what a reasonable thing to do, why even ask? Of course, you are not David Fincher.
You see, this exact thing happened to Brad Pitt during the filming of Se7en, and instead of stopping filming, the director, David Fincher, simply had Pitt's hand-through-windshield injury written into the movie. The cast on his arm wasn't a nice touch of realism to show what actually happens to good guys when they get busted up chasing bad guys -- that was a real cast.
New Line CinemaAlso, Morgan Freeman brought that hat from home every day.
This presented more problems than you might think. Since movies are rarely shot in chronological order, Pitt still had a number of scenes to film that took place before that chase scene. Obviously, choreographing another injury earlier in the film would've been overkill, so Pitt simply put his hand in his pocket or otherwise out of view during those scenes. It's unclear why they didn't simply shut down shooting while Pitt recuperated, but we assume it was budgetary reasons.
New Line CinemaAlso, maybe something wouldn't keep that long.
You've probably been cruelly tricked by a few bottom stairs in your time, but it's unlikely you've beaten Jaimie Alexander in terms of the sheer scale of injury suffered. While filming Thor: The Dark World, Alexander wiped out on a slick metal staircase, leaving her with a herniated disc, dislocated shoulder, something torn that we can't pronounce, and eleven chipped vertebrae. Did you even know you had that many vertebrae? Try to construct a scenario in which you chip 11 of them at once, on purpose.
Marvel"I took all the pieces and built this out of them."
After figuring out something was wrong on account of the teeny bit of paralysis she was experiencing, Alexander spent about a week in the hospital, and then a month in rehab. Which doesn't seem like much! They make their women tough, those Asgardians. You might also be glad to know that when she did head back to work, she got teased about staircases a bit, because it seems that even when you're famous, your co-workers will still kinda be assholes.
When Halle Berry accepted the role of a woman stuck in a haunted asylum in Gothika, she knew it was going to involve intensity and pain, but she probably didn't realize how much of that would be physical. For instance, during a "scene of intense struggle" with Dr. Robert Downey, Jr., he broke her arm. This wasn't, like, a big stunt or anything. He just pulled her arm wrong and broke that shit.
Warner Bros.It was all worth it too, in that it resulted in the creation of this fine ... entry in a Cracked article.
As broken bones are known to do, this seems to have caused quite a rift between the pair. While promoting the movie, Berry insisted it was just a case of adrenaline running high and actors losing themselves in their craft, but to this day she reportedly still avoids him, evidently because he didn't act sorry enough at the time.
Warner Bros.Also, on her cast he signed, "Get Well Soon, Haley."
Getting killed on the set of a movie is a rare but real occurrence. Brandon Lee was famously killed while filming The Crow. A stuntman was killed making Spider-Man. An effects technician was killed while operating a camera during The Dark Knight. A stuntman fell through a false floor and died making Suburban Commando. And world-famous cartoon character/leading man Brendan Fraser was killed making The Mummy. What's that? Brendan Fraser's not dead, you say? Well sure, he's alive now, but according to Fraser, for 18 seconds, while filming a hanging scene, he was dead.
Universal PicturesThe director would later apologize by offering him a bit role in G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra.
For the scene where Fraser's character is hanging by a noose, director Stephen Sommers decided the noose wasn't tight enough. What happened next isn't entirely clear, but Fraser said of the incident "I figured, 'I'll get oxygen and hold my breath,' and I was up on my toes and something went wrong -- and the next thing I knew, I was waking up."
Co-star Rachel Weisz confirmed that Fraser had to be resuscitated, and also that the filmmakers continued to give zero shits about his personal safety. "They were all 'Are you all right darling? OK, carry on. Time's money,'" she said. Wow. What admirable dedication to the craft (of risking other people's lives).
Universal Pictures
Imagine what could have been if they'd put that kind of effort into The Mummy Returns.
Choreographing fight scenes is harder than it looks, and that's doubly true for James Bond, who has to dodge fists while on water skis while having sex. He's also often smoking. It's a lot to keep straight, and while it doesn't always work, it usually doesn't go quite as bad as it did for Daniel Craig on the set of Quantum Of Solace.
Eon ProductionsWho could have used three or four quantums of solace after filming this one.
One day while filming one of those dance scenes Hollywood keeps insisting are fights, a stuntman's foot set sail for Craig's face at which point he forgot he was supposed to duck. We're not fight choreographers, but we assumed you don't need two spreadsheets and a manager's approval to figure out that you should guide your face out of the way of an incoming meaty boot. In Craig's defense, he probably had a lot on his mind.
The kick resulted in eight stitches and a big ol' shiner, but because technology has progressed far beyond 1995 Se7en levels, they just CGI'd it out. Not so easy to deal with was the fingertip he severed on the same shoot, which required plastic surgery to get back into shaking-not-stirring shape. That wasn't the only thing to go wrong on this shoot; there was a fire, a stunt driver crashed a car into a lake, and another stuntman got put in a coma.
Eon ProductionsYou can recreate the feeling by watching Quantum Of Solace.
After that last one they finally figured it was time to shut down production for a while. It was getting to be a pretty big body count for the villains in a Bond movie, much less the people making it.
Yes, Channing Tatum once scalded his dick for the sake of cinema, but this did not happen on the set of the movie you think it did. You know. The penisy movie. No, the year before the movie that would make his junk famous, Channing Tatum was filming the historical drama The Eagle in sunny Scotland, unaware of just how eventful this film would also be for his undercarriage.
Focus Features
His channing and both tatums.
Here's the setup: They were filming a scene in the water, which is chilly work at the best of times, and worse still in Scottish times. The actors were in wet suits and such, but even still, there was a crew member on set who was tasked with filling bottles of warm water to bring to the actors, including Tatum, who poured it over his genitals, because that shit gets cold. He poured it on other parts as well, probably, but we'll focus on The Eagle itself for now.
Anyways, our poor dick-warmer got a little careless at one point, and brought Tatum a much-too-hot bottle of water which scorched the skin right off his dick. Yes, off, like a wet paper towel disintegrating around its cardboard tube.
Focus FeaturesHere he is, aiming for the production assistant after returning to the set.
His little bald man, now much balder, had to be wrapped in bandages that could only be removed so he could pee. Luckily, everything healed up pretty quickly, with no scarring or permanent damage. Everyone had a happy ending, even if it probably took Tatum a few months to experience a happy ending for himself, if you know what we mea ... oh, cool, he had sex a week later. What a star, what an absolute star.
Also check out 12 Classic Movie Moments Made Possible by Abuse and Murder and 7 Insane Behind-The-Scenes Problems Recent Movies Dealt With.
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