10 On-Set Injuries That Forever Changed Actors

Unsurprisingly, Jackie ‘I do all my own stunts’ Chan has sustained quite a few injuries over the course of his 60-year career. In fact, his extensive inventory of injuries reads longer than his arm which – funnily enough – is one of the few bones he hasn’t broken.

He has, however, broken his breastbone, his ankle, his knee, his jaw, two of his fingers and his nose not once, not twice but thrice. That’s alongside dislocating his shoulder, cheekbone and pelvis and damaging his spine after falling from a 50-foot-tall clock tower.

But his most serious injury came when shooting a relatively simple stunt for 1986’s Armour of God. Chan was leaping from a wall into a tree when he slipped and fell to the ground, hitting his head on a rock that drove a piece of his own skull into his brain.

Several hours of brain surgery later and the ever-resilient Chan was on the road to recovery but was left with a permanent hole in his head that is stuffed with a plastic plug to, in his own words, “keep his brains in”. Nothing too worrying, then.