Movie stunts are fun to watch. Watching actors do bad-ass stunts in action movies might seem fake but many times, they are real, and really dangerous.
Here are 5 actors who have been badly injured or almost killed while acting a movie scene…
1. Jason Statham
Jason Statham almost drowned at the bottom of the Black Sea because the brakes on his truck stopped working while filming a stunt in The Expendables 3. The truck went over the nine-foot edge of the dock and quickly started sinking into the water.
“We start sinking fast, straight to the bottom. So, like, 60 feet at the bottom of the Black Sea, stuck in the mud, and I’m thinking, ‘How am I gonna get out of this?'” Statham tried to compose himself, pulled himself out of the truck’s window, and started swimming to the surface as quickly as possible.
2. Isla Fisher
Remember that iconic scene in Now You See Me where Isla Fisher pretended to drown in front of an audience? The truth is she actually almost drowned in real life in front of the entire cast and crew while filming the scene; in which her character was supposed to perform an underwater magic trick. Fisher said that the crew didn’t realize it right away because they all just thought she was great at acting.
3. Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Renner fell about 20 feet while shooting a scene in the comedy Tag, and he broke both of his arms. The actors on set assumed production would be immediately shut down. But Renner “went right back to work in the afternoon and finished shooting.”
4. Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan has broken pretty much every single body part — and he even got a hole in his head — throughout his entire career as an action star. During an interview, Jackie Chan started listing every single injury he’s had on set.
He pointed to dozens of body parts, saying, “Broken, broken, teeth gone, jaw, cheek broken, broken, crack, crack, crack, scratch”. He even had Steve Harvey feel the hole in his head. Chan simply explained that while filming his older movies; they didn’t have the money to add special effects or to CGI anything. So when he needed to jump from one building to the next, he’d just jump to the building.
5. Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Stallone wanted to make sure the boxing scenes looked so real in Rocky IV that he instructed Dolph Lundgren to actually hit him. After getting hit in the chest, Stallone had to stay in the ICU for nine days. According to the doctors, the punch was so powerful that it “caught the ribs and hit the heart against the ribcage.”