6. Brad Pitt Ruptures His Achilles Heel Playing Achilles
One of Hollywood's noble stabs at the increasingly moribund sword-and-sandals genre, 2003's Troy retold Homer's The Illiad in the only way Tinseltown knows how with swooping melodrama, impossibly good-looking people and no small amount of wooden acting. Chief among the offenders was leading star Brad Pitt, who took the battlefield as the legendary Greek hero Achilles and diced his way through credible accent work like his character did Trojans. Aside from being a fascinating character in an epic yarn from one of history's greatest poets, there's other reasons we remember Achilles today, and those reasons come from the source material itself. Having been dipped in the River Styx as a baby, the demigod Achilles was completely invulnerable unless you shot him in the heel he was dipped in by. Naturally, the Trojan prince Paris manages this, ending his life, and giving us the phrase 'Achilles Heel' meaning someone's weak point and naming the Achilles tendon, the tendon connecting the foot to the leg via the heel bone. As anyone who's ever ruptured their Achilles will tell you, it's horribly painful and strangely noisy to boot. Yet most of us injure our tendons in our everyday lives, playing squash, falling awkwardly or whatnot. We don't rupture our Achilles while playing Achilles himself. Unfortunately, this was the misfortune that befell Pitt during the film's shoot, putting him out of action for seven months, and giving the internet a punchline that was almost too ridiculous to be true. The coincidence wasn't lost on Brad Pitt either, who later addressed the coincidence in interviews with a weary sense of resignation. "It's a true story," he said. "It's sad, it's stupid, but it's true. It's so wrong. It's such a bad headline."
