Robert Downey Jr. suffered an ankle injury while performing a stunt on the set of Iron Man 3. The injury has shut down production for a short period of time while the actor recovers.

Injuries on movie sets are surprisingly common, particularly when actors choose to do their own stunts. A few notable movie accidents:

Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double suffered a spinal injury that left him paralyzed during the filming of The Deathly Hallows.

While playing Achilles in Troy, Brad Pitt fell and tore his achilles tendon. Irony, we has it. This also was not Pitt’s first film injury. While filming Seven, Brad Pitt fell during a chase scene, cutting his arm as it went through a car windshield. The accident, and the cast he wore afterward, were written into the film for continuity.

Halle Berry is another who has been repeatedly hurt in pursuit of her art. She injured her eye while shooting the Bond film Die Another Day. On the set of Gothika, she broke her arm. And, while playing Cat Woman, she hit her head and spent several hours under observation to ensure that she had not sustained a brain injury.

During the filming of the 1969 movie Shark! a stuntman was mauled to death by a shark that was supposed to be sedated.

Howard Hughes epic film 1956 The Conqueror left behind epic carnage. The movie was filmed in the Nevada desert, 137 miles downwind from the Nevada Test Site, a nuclear testing zone. By the 1980s, 91 of the 220 members of the cast and crew had developed some form of cancer, and 46 had died from it, including screen legend John Wayne. 

Rescue workers who came to the set of a Resident Evil installment after a platform collapsed encountered a scene that was far more gory than they were expecting. The 16 actors who fell off a platform during shooting were in full zombie make-up, making them appear far more seriously injured.

Vin Diesel’s stunt double in xXx, Harry L. O’Connor, was killed while rappelling down a parasailing line. The director used the stuntman’s first take of the scene in the film out of respect for it being O’Connor’s final performance.

While doing a maneuver known as a flat spin for the movie Top Gun, pilot Art Scholl lost control and crashed. Neither he nor the plane were ever found.

Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed in a helicopter crash while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie. The accident and the lawsuit that followed it resulted in stricter safety requirements for movies.

In 1978’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the helicopter crash was unintentional. However, since the actors inside were not injured, a scene was ad-libbed and added to the movie. 

Permalink Share it: