And finally, time to catalogue some of the more hare-brained ways in which Very Famous People have attempted to kill themselves and occasionally others while engaged in the high art of cinema. While filming Seven in 1995, Brad Pitt put his arm through a car windscreen, and needed surgery they wrote the injury into the film to explain the presence of the cast. For lovers of irony the world over, let it be known that Pitt also tore his Achilles tendon while playing Achilles in Wolfgang Petersens snoozeworthy go at one of the greatest stories in literature, Troy (2004). In a classic case of art imitating life, Jim Caviezel was actually whipped for real in parts of filming The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and separated his shoulder carrying the cross. He also suffered hypothermia during the shoot, and was struck by lightning shortly before filming the Sermon of the Mount scene. Sounds like someone was trying to tell you something, Big Jim. Stay with us, here: on the set of Moulin Rouge! (2001), Nicole Kidman fractured two ribs and hurt her right knee, requiring several of the scenes she had left to be shot hiding the cast on her leg. Harrison Ford also needed to be filmed from the waist up last year after breaking his leg filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens when a hydraulic door fell on him, requiring a plate and screws to be inserted. On on Flux (2005), Charlize Theron landed on her neck after attempting backflips during filming, herniating a disc close to her spinal cord and forcing a two month shutdown in production. The same year, George Clooney broke his back in a stunt gone utterly pear-shaped on Syriana. Apparently pain from the injury still troubles him today, and was at one point so bad that he considered suicide. Eighty years earlier, renowned physical comedian and actor Buster Keaton was filming Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and fell from a water tower. He stood up and ran after that: he definitely shouldnt have, as during a routine physical examination in 1935, an X-ray revealed that he had broken his neck in the fall. While filming a lynching scene on Back To The Future Part III in 1990, Michael J. Fox was asphyxiated for real and passed out for a few seconds before someone had the presence of mind to loosen the noose and prevent the films star from actually being hung to death. Thats not quite as dodgy as Quentin Tarantinos incident on Inglourious Basterds (2009), though. During the scene where Hans Diane Krugers character was being strangled to death, he stood in as Christoph Waltz's body double in order to add realism to the scene, but got carried away Kruger was legitimately choked out and briefly lost consciousness. If only the director of the film had stepped in and prevented Tarantino from losing himself in the moment. But its Halle Danger Berry that takes the Darwin award for the Most Injury And Accident Prone Actor Who Isnt Jackie Chan. Mention has already been made of how she hurt her eye and nearly choked to death on a fig while filming Die Another Day in 2002: well, human risk factor Robert Downey Jnr. actually broke her arm while pretending to restrain her during filming on Gothika in 2003, and the following year Berry would hit her head on a lighting prop and suffer a nasty injury on the set of Catwoman. In 2012, Berry broke her right foot on location while filming Cloud Atlas, requiring the schedule to be amended so that she could rehabilitate her foot for two and a half weeks. Upon returning to work, she reinjured the same foot when slipping off a rock. The next year, Madame Death Wish fell and hit her head on a concrete floor while filming a fight scene for The Call, and was taken to hospital. The poor woman is clearly made of papier mache.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
