20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gladiator

Turns out Gibson had a point about how hard the shoot would turn out to be (he probably still had nightmares about nearly being crushed by a falling horse filming Braveheart a few years beforehand).

Remember Gladiator’s forest-based opening battle, and the stitches on Maximus’ face afterwards? That’s not make-up: Crowe’s horse startled, forcing him into tree branches which ripped at his face.

Those gladiatorial scenes weren’t a picnic, either. During a sword fighting scene, Crowe’s right forefinger was bashed, and it took him two years to get the feeling back. During the course of that long, gruelling shoot, he also broke his foot, cracked a hip during a fall, and exacerbated an old bicep injury from when he was training to be a gymnast in a movie for Jodie Foster.

The previous year he’d ripped both Achilles tendons when working on Mystery, Alaska - he’d played an ice hockey player, but was unaccustomed to wearing skates fourteen hours a day. The costume designer on Gladiator was convinced that no one in ancient Rome had heels on their shoes, so the sandalled footwear aggravated the barely-healed Achilles injuries.

Those Achilles injuries would be the bane of his life: much later, he made a 14 foot drop while shooting Robin Hood, but didn’t have the flexibility to absorb the impact and took it on his knees, causing joint injuries that led to edemas - a build-up of fluid in the bone marrow. Ouch.

Hilariously, the studio was worried about Crowe hurting himself and bringing production to a crashing halt… so they forbade him from playing football during the shoot.