10 Extreme Movie Scenes That Left Stars Scarred

10. The Mirror Scene - Nightcrawler

Velvet Buzzsaw director Dan Gilroy’s feature debut Nightcrawler was an intense slice of blackly comic neo noir which proved that a lean, bug-eyed Jake Gyllenhall was an acting heavyweight. The Prince of Persia star showed he was more than a blockbuster hero with his terrifying turn as the flick’s blank-faced anti-hero, a sociopathic crime scene photographer who plays way too big a role in his work.

Unfortunately, like a lot of actors attempting to prove their dramatic chops, Gyllenhall couldn’t resist a good dramatic mirror thumping sequence.

Not unlike Channing Tatum during the filming of Foxcatcher, Donnie Darko himself took his moody mirror-smashing scene way too seriously and genuinely sliced his hand open in the take that made it into the movie. Like Tatum (whose film was released the same year, weirdly), the actor punched clean through the later of safety glass, shattered the real stuff beneath and needed a hospital trip after the fact.

Gilroy of course kept this nasty accident in the film, so keep your eyes peeled to see Gyllenhall’s genuine blood in the scene if you’re into that sort of thing.