5 Movies That Chewed Up Actors And Spit Them Out

5

Die Hard Left Bruce Willis Partially Deaf

For a while, Bruce Willis was the coolest man on the planet, but as the years (and the hairs) have piled up, he has slowly morphed into a cantankerous coot. (A coot who could kick your ass, sure, but a coot nonetheless.) But there's a good reason why he appears so constantly frustrated, craning his neck and furrowing his brow as if he's struggling mightily to keep up with the flow of conversation. That reason is: Die Hard.

The man, it turns out, sacrificed his physical well-being to bring us the scruffy perfection that is John McClane. In his own words, "Due to an accident on the first Die Hard, I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear and have a tendency to say, 'Whaaa?'" So he's not just being willfully obtuse for the sake of being obnoxious, it seems. While defending her Pops from all the snarky internet jerks making fun of his performance-arty interviews, Willis' daughter Rumer elaborated: "I think part of the problem is sometimes he can't hear ... because he shot a gun off next to his ear when he was doing Die Hard a long time ago, so he has partial hearing loss in his ears."

20th Century Fox

So don't judge Bruce too harshly when he grumps like a gramps every time he gets near a microphone. In addition to the eardrum thing, his daughter described another increasingly difficult and painful hurdle he must face every day: "I think he just has this vibe where he feels like he's gotta kinda do a cool man [thing]." OK, you could have just said that.

4

Star Trek: Nemesis Made Tom Hardy Smoke Crack

Many people don't know Tom Hardy starred in a Star Trek film. Tom Hardy wishes he was in that group -- early on in his career, he appeared in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) as Captain Picard's younger, sulkier, telepathic rapist-ier clone. It was not a good movie, and the 25-year-old actor dealt with this fact by self-medicating with booze and crack cocaine.

Paramount Pictures

3

Groundhog Day Destroyed Bill Murray's Friendship With Harold Ramis

The friendship between comedy icons Bill Murray and the late Harold "Egon" Ramis produced some of the funniest moments this world has seen: the duo worked on, among many things, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, and Groundhog Day.

Columbia Pictures

2

Napoleon Dynamite's Pedro Had Evil Twin Troubles

Despite having exhortations to vote for his character plastered on every tchotchke at the mall circa 2006, the actor behind Pedro in the quirky classic Napoleon Dynamite, Efren Ramirez, didn't exactly go onto huge things after becoming instantly recognizable worldwide. He's not a rail-riding troubadour or anything, but his fame was sufficient enough to cause his life to become a drama-filled mess.

1

An Injury During Syriana Made George Clooney Contemplate Suicide

The political thriller Syriana was kind of a monkey's paw situation for George Clooney. Sure, his role of CIA operative Bob Barnes earned him an Oscar for best supporting actor, but it came at the cost of excruciating, months-long, potentially life-ending pain.

During the scene where Clooney's strapped to a chair and receiving a pummeling/fingernail removal procedure in the course of his governmental duties, the chair tipped over and caused the actor to go bonk on the concrete. Here he is explaining what happened next: "I tore my dura, which is the wrap around my spine that holds in the spinal fluid. But it's not my back; it's my brain. I basically bruised my brain. It's bouncing around my head because it's not supported by the spinal fluid."

Warner Bros. Pictures

We joke, but for Clooney it was dead serious. The resulting headaches drove him to distraction, and he refused to take any meds for them out of fear of becoming part of the opioid addiction epidemic that's all the rage today.

Concentrating was not an easy task, and he was reduced to writing his lines on scraps of paper for his performance in Good Night, And Good Luck. It got so bad that Clooney admits suicide started looking like a reasonable option. Eventually, a neurologist got to the bottom of his problem and solved the issue with multiple surgeries, and Clooney's greatest preoccupation went back to being psychologically tormenting his best friends.

E. Reid Ross is the author of Nature Is The Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want To Go Outside Again, which is in stores now and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Also check out 5 Iconic Roles That Made Actors' Lives A Living Hell and 7 Famous Actors In Hit Movies (That Were A Personal Hell).

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