People say actors don’t deserve all the money they receive. Millions of dollars just to appear on camera for a few weeks? It’s not fair!
But it’s not that simple. Yeah, we pay our athletes and entertainers too much money; however let’s not pretend like they have the easiest job in the world. Actors work extremely hard to produce quality entertainment, and sometimes their passion gets them in some serious trouble.
The 10 actors you see down below definitely earned their ridiculous paychecks.
No. 10 – Joseph Gordon-Levitt
While filming the 2012 thriller Premium Rush, Joseph Gordon-Levitt had a little accident while riding his bike around New York City. The actor told Celebuzz that a diplomat is to blame for the nasty cut on his arm, which required 31 stitches.
“A diplomat broke through our lock-up. You know, in New York City, you have the United Nations. There’s diplomats driving around, and they can break the law. So, he broke through our cones and went past the cops and double parked right where we were shooting. Basically, I ended up going through the rear window of a taxi cab.”
Joseph is a true actor, though. Instead of going down to the ground in pain, he asked the director of the film to shoot video of his injury, “I was stoked that they actually put it in (the movie).” He said.
No. 9 – Charlize Theron
Looking back at it now, Charlize Theron probably regrets agreeing to star in 2005’s massive flop, Aeon Flux. The film lost nearly $10 million after only taking in $52 million worldwide. Critics hated it, fans hated it and it was nominated for a few Razzies.
But we can’t blame the failure on Charlize Theron. She gave this movie her all, and ended up with a pretty serious neck injury. While performing a series of back handsprings, she slipped and landed on her neck. She was hospitalized for five days after suffering nerve damage, “It was numb on the right side of my body.” Theron told reporters. Production was shut down for two months while she recovered.
No. 8 – Channing Tatum
Channing Tatum’s gruesome injury wasn’t life-threatening; however we have to imagine it was probably one of the most painful injuries on this list. The 34-year-old actor was in Scotland filming a scene for the 2011 film The Eagle, and during the scene his character had to wade through freezing water in a wetsuit. Between takes, the crew would warm Tatum up by pouring a mix of boiling water and river water down his wetsuit.
After the last shot of the day, a crew member asked the actor if he wanted to warm up before he left the set for the day…
“I’m like, Nah, I’m good. And then I thought, Why not? Thing is, he’d forgotten to dilute the kettle water. So he poured scalding water down my suit. And I was trying to pull the suit away from my body to somehow get away from the boiling water, and the more I pulled the suit away, the lower the water went. It just went straight down and pretty much burned the skin off the head of my dick.”
Yeah. He suffered some serious burns to his penis. He was rushed to the hospital (which was an hour away) and they loaded him up with morphine once he arrived. Thankfully, everything healed up eventually, but Tatum claims it was the most painful thing he has ever experienced.
No. 7 – Jason Statham
Jason Statham’s co-stars say it was the actor’s professional diving experience that helped him get out of a scary situation while filming The Expendables 3. Statham was driving a three-ton truck when the brakes went out, which resulted in a 60-foot plunge into the Black Sea.
“Luckily we had taken the doors off before.” Stallone told reporters. But he added that if anyone else was behind the wheel, they probably would have died…
“If anyone else had been in that truck we would have been dead because we were all wearing heavy boots and gun belts. We would have drowned. But because Jason is an Olympic-quality diver he got out of it.”
No. 6 – Bruce Willis
Most of the injuries you see on this list only caused temporary discomfort, but Bruce Willis suffered permanent damage while filming the first Die Hard. The director of the film, John McTiernan, had extra-loud blanks to make the film feel and sound as real as possible. It worked out great for the movie, but it ended up causing permanent hearing loss for poor Bruce.
“I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear and have a tendency to say, ‘Whaaa?'” He revealed during a Q&A session with The Guardian.
This may explain why he’s so freaking grumpy all the time.
No. 5 – Jaimie Alexander
During an interview with the New York Post, Jaimie Alexander explained just how bad the injury she suffered on the London set of Thor: Dark World really was.
“It was raining, it was dark outside, it was like 5 in the morning — and I went down a metal staircase and slipped and slipped a disc in my thoracic spine and chipped 11 of my vertebrae… I knocked my left shoulder out of place and tore my rhomboid on my right side . . . It took me out of filming for a month.”
Ouch.
No. 4 – Jackie Chan
Oh, Jackie Chan. He has injured himself several times while performing stunts for his movies, but his worst injury happened on the set of the 1986 film, Armour of God. During the filming of the opening sequence, Jackie was asked to jump from a castle wall to a tree branch. He successfully completed the jump on the first take, but he wasn’t pleased with the result, so he decided to perform the stunt again.
During his second attempt, the tree branch broke and Chan fell 25 feet to the ground. His head slammed against a rock on the ground, which cracked his skull and forced a piece of bone up into his brain. He was flown to the hospital and was in surgery for over eight hours. Decades later, he still has a hole in his head filled with a little plastic plug “to keep (his) brains in.”
No. 3 – Halle Berry
The extremely talented actress wasn’t even performing a stunt when she broke her arm on the set of Gothika. The accident took place right in the middle of the film’s nine-week shoot in Canada. Berry was filming a scene which required her to put up a fight against a doctor (Robert Downey Jr.) who was trying to pin her to a cot. She apparently got really into the scene because she resisted his grip with so much force that she broke her ulna.
“I knew that it was broken instantly and Robert knew it, too, because he heard the [ulna] snap.” The actress revealed. She impressed her co-stars by returning to the set just three weeks later.
No. 2 – George Clooney
The pain George Clooney suffered after his injury on the set of Syriana was so severe that it actually made him contemplate suicide. While filming an intense scene for the film, Clooney severely injured his spine. The constant pain from the accident was too much for the actor.
He told Rolling Stone the following…
“I was at a point where I thought, ‘I can’t exist like this. I can’t actually live.’ I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and for a short three-week period, I started to think, ‘I may have to do something drastic about this.'”
Thankfully, he eventually had successful surgery to fix the painful injury.
No. 1 – Sylvester Stallone
Stallone wanted everything to be completely realistic while filming the original punching scenes between his character Rocky and Dolph Lundgren’s character Drago. Every punch landed was real, and at one point, Stallone asked Dolph to really try to knock him out. The incredibly strong punch to Stallone’s chest slammed his heart against his breastbone, which caused his heart to swell.
He went to the emergency room later in the day because he had trouble breathing. Once inside the hospital, Stallone realized just how serious the injury was. His blood pressure was over 200 and he was forced to stay in intensive care for nine days. If he hadn’t went to the hospital that night, doctors say his heart would have likely stopped.
