Famous Movie Scenes That Nearly Killed Actors

Halle Berry is an Oscar-winning talent and a seemingly ageless wonder — unfortunately, she might also be one of the most accident-prone stars in Hollywood. Berry has been injured multiple times while filming over the course of her career, and it's occasionally actually been fairly serious. She broke an arm during Gothika, hit her head on a lighting rig during Catwoman, broke and re-injured her foot during Cloud Atlas, and smashed her head on the floor during The Call. Most embarrassingly, Berry had a scarily close brush with death while filming Die Another Day... when she choked on a fig during a sex scene with Pierce Brosnan. Sadly, that is not a euphemism.

You wouldn't necessarily think that a movie about a guy living all by himself for years on a deserted tropical island would end up being all that dangerous for its star to make, but you'd be wrong. Just ask America's dad, Tom Hanks, who nearly died while filming Cast Away — a film that ended up being notoriously hard on his body in a surprising number of ways. After gaining and losing 50 pounds in order to accurately portray a marooned Fed Ex delivery man — a process that takes a definite physical toll — Hanks suffered a cut on his leg that reportedly swelled for two weeks. When he finally went to a hospital, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening staph infection. Thanks for nothing, Wilson.

George Clooney put audiences on the edge of their seats with his 2005 geopolitical thriller Syriana — and he put himself in unbearable pain, and eventually the hospital, in the bargain. While filming a torture scene for Syriana, Clooney was severely hurt when he sustained a head injury. While he knew he was in pain, doctors were unable to diagnose the exact nature of his injury for many weeks, and his agonizing condition was left untreated. It wasn't until Lisa Kudrow's brother, a neurologist, discovered that Clooney was actually leaking spinal fluid that he was finally able to receive proper treatment. Reportedly, the pain was so intense that Clooney contemplated suicide at one point — which, not that we're holding a grudge or anything, is pretty much how Batman & Robin made everyone else feel.

According to this comprehensive breakdown of Jackie Chan's endless on-set injuries, he's broken almost every bone in his body, torn ligaments, been badly burned, and damaged his spine on several occasions. But wait, there's more! On the set of Armour of God II, he sustained an injury so bad, he had to have brain surgery. Chan later told Parade, "I still have a metal plate in my head and can feel the indentation from the impact."

Compared to some of the stuff he's done — like free-falling 60 feet, sliding down the side of a skyscraper, and getting hit by a real, flying helicopter — the Armour of God II stunt was relatively tame. He was jumping from a slope and into a tree when he missed and fell to the ground, smacking his head on a rock, which sent a piece of his skull into his brain. Amazingly, this happened in the early '90s, and Chan continued to make many more films, performing almost all of his own stunts — in other words, the exact opposite of what any normal person would do, which is nothing even remotely dangerous ever again. "Oh, you guys are going on that rollercoaster? I'm cool. I'll be over here on this safe, motionless bench, not having a piece of my brain shoved into my skull again."

During a fight scene in the final episode of Lost, Terry O'Quinn accidentally stabbed co-star Matthew Fox with a fixed prop knife rather than the collapsible one generally used for body blows. According to this breakdown of fellow Lost castmate Jorge Garcia's description of the incident on his podcast Geronimo Jack's Beard, there was confusion over which knife was to be used for which scenes, as well as what kind of padding Fox was going to wear to protect himself. Luckily, he was wearing a kevlar vest when the potentially fatal blow was dealt, leaving him only with "a nasty bruise." Not to mention a probably pretty chilly work environment for the rest of the day. We can just imagine O'Quinn trying to have awkward small talk about the quality of the craft services potato salad while Fox just glares at him, then down at the cutlery, then back up at him again.

Most of the people on this list were badly injured — and yes, could have been killed in their on-set accidents — but none went through quite the nightmare Donald Sutherland experienced on the set of Kelly's Heroes in 1968, when he contracted pneumococcus bacterium (meningitis) from the Danube River and actually momentarily died. Sutherland claims he had an out-of-body experience and watched himself slide toward a blue light for several moments before somehow being ripped back to reality. His description of the incident to Smithsonian is truly chilling.

"And then, just as I was seconds away from succumbing to the seductions of that matte white light glowing purely at what appeared to be the bottom of it, some primal force fiercely grabbed my feet and compelled them to dig my heels in," Sutherland recalled. "The downward journey slowed and stopped. I'd been on my way to being dead when some memory of the desperate rigor I'd applied to survive all my childhood illnesses pulled me back. Forced me to live. I was alive. I'd come out of the coma. Sick as a dog, but alive." Wow, that's both poetic and terrifying at once, especially because it took him over six weeks to recover. Which reminds us: we need to make a note to never, ever, ever set foot in the Danube River. Ever.

The 2013 crime caper film Now You See Me packs a ton of magical visuals, but the magic of CGI meant the actors never really had to get in harm's way. Right? Well... not quite. One of the stage performances had Isla Fisher's character Henley drop, handcuffed, into a giant water tank so she could escape in front of a cheering crowd. Her chain gets stuck, but moments from death, she escapes in the knick of time. Only in real life, the drama wasn't entirely fake. Just like her character in the movie, Fisher got stuck in the water tank and spent almost three full minutes struggling to get out. She told Chelsea Lately, "Everyone thought I was acting fabulously. I was actually drowning... No one realized I was actually struggling."

You could safely say that there's never been a better movie about post-apocalyptic boat fights than Waterworld. Which isn't saying a lot, obviously, but there it is. In that genre, Waterworld is king. But the fact that it exists at all is what's truly surprising. Amid the many, many production difficulties — a ballooning budget, entire sets sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and jellyfish just everywhere — one story tends to sink to the bottom of the pile: that time Kevin Costner almost died.

While he was filming a scene that had him tethered to the top of a sailboat's mast, a sudden storm swept over the set and caught Costner dangling from the rickety mast. Wind and waves smashed into him repeatedly, but the squall made it too dangerous for the crew to pull him down. According to People, Costner later told a friend that he'd "almost died" during the 30-minute ordeal.

Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn has played some harrowing roles in her career, but few of them came with the level of intensity she experienced on the set of 1973's The Exorcist. As Chris MacNeil, the mother of little demon-possessed Regan, Burstyn went all out in portraying the horror her character experienced during her daughter's progression from a doe-eyed schoolgirl to the potty-mouthed pawn of Satan. But director William Friedkin wasn't always sold on her performance, so he took measures to make sure things got as real as possible... measures that included giving Burstyn permanent spinal damage.

During the infamous scene when Regan slaps her mother across the room, Burstyn was tied to a cable that yanked her to the floor. After multiple takes, Friedkin told the guy pulling the cable to just yank the hell out of it for the next one. He did, slamming Burstyn against the floor so hard that she reportedly broke her tailbone and spent years dealing with the injury. Sure, spinal damage can be deadly, but anything for a shot, right? That take — and Burstyn's real cry of pain — made it into the final cut.

The Princess Bride is a movie made of memorable moments, but only one of them landed lead actor Cary Elwes in the hospital. And after you know about it, you'll never be able to watch the scene the same way again. After Westley and Buttercup escape the fire swamp, they're ambushed by Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen. The scene ends with Rugen bopping Westley on the head to knock him out, but during filming, Christopher Guest, who played Count Rugen, was afraid to really hit Cary Elwes. Finally, Elwes said basically, "Look, just go ahead and hit me for real." The actor obliged and accidentally whacked Elwes unconscious, presumably after sarcastically muttering "As you wish..." In the scene you see in the movie, Cary Elwes is actually collapsing unconscious from the blow.

If there's one thing you remember about Kate Winslet in Titanic, chances are it isn't the scene of her running through the ship's hallways to escape the floodwaters. But while the drawing scene (and plenty of others) almost embarrassed her to death, it was the flooding sequence that came a couple breaths away from killing her. In the scene above, Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio had to run through a narrow hallway below deck while a wave of water crashed over them and swept them against a locked gate. Winslet's big coat got caught on the gate, though, and kept her from coming up for air. Winslet was traumatized, but director James Cameron? He let her catch her breath and then set up for another take, since Winslet had just ruined that one with her silly near-death experience.

They say war is hell, but war never visited the set of Apocalypse Now. The infamously troubled production drove plenty of people — including director Francis Ford Coppola — to the brink of insanity. But the one event that came the closest to grinding the production to a standstill was 36-year-old Martin Sheen's heart attack in the middle of the jungle. According to the Daily Mail, the crew found Sheen "crawling along a road looking for help." Keep in mind that this was the star of the movie — and they lost him long enough that they had to find him on the side of the road. As Coppola relates it, that incident was nearly the final straw that sent him into a nervous breakdown.

That wasn't the only time Sheen damaged himself on the set. In the opening scene (above), he broke the mirror in his room in an unscripted moment, but he was too drunk to realize that his hand was gushing blood where the glass cut him. That's definitely... some kind of dedication. Probably.

The Wizard of Oz dazzled moviegoers in 1939 with its technicolor vision of Oz, but not all of the actors escaped that movie magic unscathed. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, came away with the worst of it after a stunt left her with third-degree burns. During the scene in which the Wicked Witch interrupts the festivities in Munchkin Country, Hamilton makes a dramatic exit by disappearing in a cloud of fire and smoke. The trick was, she fell through a trapdoor in the set that was hidden by a plume of smoke, and once she was safely out of harm's way, a jet of flame completed the effect for the camera. In one take, however, the trapdoor didn't open when it was supposed to, and Hamilton got caught in the pyrotechnic flamethrower, which severely burned her hands and face. In that big black witch's robe, it's a miracle she didn't completely catch on fire.

Ed Harris has been eligible for a senior citizen discount for years, but for our money, he still ranks high on the list of film actors you wouldn't want to mess with — and he would have ranked even higher in the late '80s, when Harris worked with director James Cameron on 1989's The Abyss. As countless filmmakers have learned the hard way (and Cameron would learn all over again with Titanic in the '90s), making movies in or around water can be incredibly difficult — and this sci-fi story, about a crew that finds more than they bargained for when they try to recover a sunken submarine, was particularly tough on Cameron's cast. In fact, Harris nearly drowned while filming one sequence when he waited until the last minute to ask for air — and then had to wait an extra couple of white-knuckle seconds while an upside-down regulator was refitted.

"The worst moments for me were being towed with fluid rushing up my nose and my eyes swelling up," Harris told the New York Times. "Once, the regulator was put in upside down so that one-half of what was going into my lungs was water. For a brief second, I thought, 'This is it'... then I was mad at myself for feeling that panic."

Harris should have taken it a little easier on himself — it's hard to imagine anyone not panicking when they're seconds away from drowning. As for Cameron, he clearly didn't learn his lesson: Titanic fell prey to all manner of water-related issues, not the least of which was the mishap that nearly killed Kate Winslet.