"My hand basically turned to feta cheese."
1. Margot Robbie trained so hard for her role in I, Tonya that she got a herniated disk.
Entertainment One / Neon / 30West
She practiced ice skating five hours a day, five times a week, for the role. "There were lots of bumps and bruises, lots of blisters. I herniated a disc in my neck. My arms started going numb for a month, but it was the disc getting irritated. And then I properly herniated it, and I was very aware when that happened. It's really painful," she said.
2. Barry Keoghan got infected by a literal flesh-eating disease before filming Banshees of Inisherin.
Searchlight Pictures
In a 2023 GQ interview, it turned out that the “gnarly scar tissue that winds its way up his arm like a snake tattoo” came from necrotising fasciitis, a flesh-eating bacteria that has a one in five risk of fatality. He caught it just before filming and nearly faced amputation — Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh told GQ, “I’m not sure if he was on a lot of meds, but he seemed to shrug it off.”
3. Isla Fischer nearly drowned in front of the crew when filming Now You See Me. They thought she was acting.
K/O Paper Products / Angela Weiss / Getty Images for AIF
While performing a Houdini-inspired stunt in a cube filled with water, the actor's chains got tangled, meaning she couldn't hit the panic button or alert the nearby diver. So, she had to frantically signal to the cast that she was struggling — who all thought she was acting, and kept the cameras rolling. "They thought I was being Meryl Streep in the tank," she said. "Actually, I was drowning."
4. Gary Oldman smoked so many cigars as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour that he developed nicotine posioning.
Universal Pictures / Focus Features
"I got serious nicotine poisoning. You’d have a cigar that was three-quarters smoked and you’d light it up, and then over the course of a couple of takes, it would go down, and then the prop man would replenish me with a new cigar — we were doing that for 10 or 12 takes a scene," he explained.
5. Filming Jobs as Steve Jobs put Ashton Kutcher in the hospital twice.
Open Road Films
The tech giant was apparently a "fruitarian," or someone who only ate fruit. So, Kutcher went method when playing him — and it made him very sick. "He was so dumb. He...only ate grapes at one point...we ended up in the hospital twice. With pancreatitis! It was really dumb!" wife Mila Kunis said.
6. Tom Hanks went pretty method while filming Cast Away, leading to a staph infection from a wound on his leg.
20th Century Studios / DreamWorks Pictures / United International Pictures
"[Cast Away] put me in the hospital. I was there for three days with something that, believe it or not, almost killed me," he said. "I got an infection from a cut, and it was eating its way through my leg. I didn't know it; I just thought I had a sore. I went to the doctor who took one look and said, 'I have to put you in the hospital because we have to get this infection out of you before it poisons your blood and you die.'"
7. Halle Berry filmed Bruised with an actual MMA fighter, who broke two of her ribs during a fighting scene.
Netflix
And apparently, Halle just rolled with it. "The fighter in me stood up and said, 'You just have to keep going, take some Advil, and tough your way through it," she told Sports Illustrated.
8. And when filming Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone thought the best way to achieve a realistic finish was to tell his scene partner to ditch the choreo and “just go out there and try to clock me."
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United International Pictures
“For the first minute of the fight, it is going to be a free-for-all," Stallone recommended. As a result, Stallone received an uppercut that "caught the ribs and hit the heart against the ribcage" — he was in the ICU for nine days.
10. Natalie Portman not only dislocated her rib when filming a lift for Black Swan, but there was no medic on set at the time and she finished filming a ballet scene on an untreated injury.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
When a medic did come along, they were filmed treating her. "When I got lifted, it went out of place. It sort of goes under another rib. So that was real, [the scene in which a physical therapist] was doing real work on me. Darren [Aronofsky, the director] was like, 'Film it! Film it! Stay in character, talk in your character's voice!'" she said.
11. Tom Cruise broke his ankle filming a stunt jump in Mission Impossible 6, and the moment ended up in the film.
Pierre Suu / GC Images
Tom Cruise didn't let his injury affect the move, which involved leaping from one building to another. He "knew instantly" it was broken, he told Graham Norton, but didn't want to have to repeat the stunt.
12. Daniel Day-Lewis broke two ribs from going method during the filming of My Left Foot.
Miramax
Not only did he make crew members carry him around the set when playing a disabled man in the movie, he also broke two ribs from never leaving his wheelchair and assuming a heavily-hunched position.
13. And Daniel Day-Lewis also caught pneumonia on the set of Gangs of New York as he refused to wrap up in warm clothes.
Miramax / Touchstone Pictures / Initial Entertainment Group
He reasoned that the coats offered to him wouldn't have existed in the period in which the movie was set — and he then refused to take modern medicine to cure his pneumonia.
14. Colin Firth's role in The King's Speech led him to develop a partly-parylising pinched nerve and headaches, alongside his own stutter.
Paramount Pictures / Columbia Pictures / MORE
"I had to learn to stammer and then play someone trying desperately not to. It put my left arm to sleep — it was very peculiar. I must have been locking something, pinching a nerve. It was a semi-paralysis that would last for three or four days," he shared.
15. Priyanka Chopra was about to perform an action scene for her role in Quantico — and then got a concussion by falling on her way to filming it.
ABC
"I was supposed to be saving someone, as usual. And I was wearing rubber boots, it was raining and there was plastic on the floor, and I slipped on that. Can you imagine, after all the action I do, that's how I get a concussion?" she revealed.
16. Michelle Yeoh tore her ACL and needed surgery after filming a scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Classics
"If you watch the movie you see me walking slowly. That’s because I had a big brace under those baggy trousers. It took me three months to recover, to be ready for the last fight sequence," she revealed, calling it "one of the most painful moviemaking experiences" she's had.
17. Dylan O'Brien fell off a moving vehicle when shooting a Maze Runner: The Death Cure stunt and was then run over by another car.
20th Century Studios
He suffered a concussion, lots of lacerations to his face, and some trauma that made it tough for him to accept later action roles.
18. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the original Wizard of Oz, suffered second and third-degree burns thanks to a failed stunt on set.
MGM
She was supposed to escape from a trapdoor while flames billowed in front of it during one scene, but on this occasion, the door didn't open. So, she spent six weeks recovering from her burns after being surrounded by flames, and would only return to the set "on one condition — no more fireworks!"
19. Zazie Beetz still has a scar on her chest from filming a convoy scene in Deadpool 2.
20th Century Studios
It happened because she caught a stray shootout shell casing during the scene — she also fainted due to her restrictive suit.
20. The Rhythm Section had to pause filming for six months because of how seriously Blake Lively damaged her hand in a fight scene.
Paramount Pictures
"My hand basically turned to feta cheese. I was lunging towards Jude Law with my fake rubber knife and my hand collided with his elbow and I broke some things, dislocated some things and severed a ligament. It was pretty intense," she shared.
21. It's probably easier to list the films in which Jackie Chan hasn't sustained an injury than to name those in which he has.
Daniele Venturelli / Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film Festival
When asked if he thinks he's broken every bone in his body while filming, he said, "Not every bone, but I can say every inch from my hat to my toes... scratched, bruised, yes. Bones? A little bit. I have a hole in my head."
22. Micheal J. Fox was almost hanged when filming a hanging scene in Back To The Future. And like Isla Fischer, for a while, people around him just thought he was acting.
Universal
He had practiced the stunt, but it didn't run as usual on the day. Fox wrote, “I swung unconscious at the end of the rope for several seconds before Bob Zemeckis, fan of me though he was, realised even I wasn't that good of an actor."
23. Jeremy Renner was only three days into filming Tag when he fell and broke both his arms.
Warner Bros. Pictures
"This isn't a bit. I broke my elbow, and I broke my wrist," he texted his castmate when it happened. He went more or less straight back into filming, with CGI covering his cast in multiple scenes.
24. George Clooney suffered a back injury so bad when filming Syriana that he ended up "blowing spinal fluid out his nose."
Warner Bros. Pictures / DreamWorks Pictures
"I was at a point where I thought, 'I can't exist like this. I can't actually live.' I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and... I started to think, 'I may have to do something drastic about this... I never thought I'd get there," he said.
25. Daniel Craig lost two front teeth while filming Casino Royale, and a fingertip in Quantum of Solace.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing
"He gets his hands very dirty," Gary Powell, the chief stunt coordinator for both Bond movies shared. "Daniel puts the work in, even if it's something he's not keen on."
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