10 Movies That Forced Actors To Face Their Fears

2. Ryan Reynolds' Claustrophobia (Buried)

Buried Ryan Reynolds
Lionsgate

A year before he battled his fear of flying in Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds was conquering another, much more potent personal demon during the production of his 2010 thriller, Buried: claustrophobia.

In the movie, Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a truck driver working in Iraq who wakes up to discover that he's been buried alive. As you'd expect, much of the film was shot with Reynolds lying in an actual coffin, and this led to the actor suffering from anxiety, insomnia, and complete and utter panic for the duration of filming.

"I'd go home and I'd pace until sun up, like a vampire, and then climb into a coffin to film", he said. "I was losing my mind, I hadn't slept in days, weeks."

Reynolds also suffered from frequent panic attacks due to being enclosed in such a tight space for hours on end. Even worse, director Rodrigo Cortés has mentioned that one of the coffins used during filming was "specially reinforced" so that Reynolds could feel the pressure of all that sand piling on top of him.

All things considered, it's really no surprise that he was freaking out on a regular basis.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!