TV Scenes That Terrified Actors In Real Life

Certain TV shows love to send their audiences cowering behind their couches, but we usually assume the actors involved were just, you know, acting. After all, despite what you've heard about method actors, most performers prefer to keep scary stuff as fake as possible. The blood is made from corn syrup, the fires are under control, and you had a nice chat with the guy in the clown suit at the craft services table over breakfast.

But just as horror shows all start with a nice normal day that goes catastrophically wrong, sometimes TV actors find themselves in scenes that produce a very real fear response. And sometimes, just reading the script tips them off that they're about to have a rough day at work. From intense death scenes and dangerous stunts to jump scares that proved way too heart-jolting, these are TV scenes that terrified actors in real life.

Signing up for "Game of Thrones" pretty much guarantees that you'll be trading blows and blades eventually. That action component appealed to Iain Glen, who played Jorah Mormont, the disgraced knight who transitioned from spying on Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) to becoming one of her most loyal servants.

As Glen explained to Elle, he loves stage fighting, but he was intimidated by the scale of Jorah's gladiatorial scene, which saw him take on multiple adversaries in the same hectic sequence. "I was pretty fearful," he said, adding, "When it's that extensive of a fight — I was fighting various people with different weapons — things can happen. Accidents can happen." Fortunately, everything worked out — for Jorah and Glen — and the scene became one of his favorite memories of working on "Thrones." "The whole gladiatorial sequence ... was a very hard week and I loved doing that," he told Entertainment Weekly. "So for the action side of things, that sequence encapsulated it."

While that was the scariest scene to shoot, a different one proved too scary to watch. Glen admitted to Variety that he couldn't bring himself to watch Jorah fight in the Battle of Winterfell because he was too emotionally invested in the character.

Usually, the only person safe from a jump scare-induced heart palpitation is the person jumping out. But Victoria Pedretti is so good at playing a ghost that she even scared herself in one especially heart-lurching scene.

In the Netflix series "The Haunting of Hill House," Pedretti plays Nell, one of the inhabitants of the titular house, who survives the ghosts in her childhood home only to die when she returns as an adult. Later on in the series, Nell's sisters get into an argument while driving to the haunted mansion — and Nell's ghost bursts between their seats, shrieking like, well, a very distraught ghost.

Pedretti told Decider that Nell wasn't trying to scare her sisters. As she explained, "It came from a deeper place and a real need, so that's why it's so loud and immediate." But it still terrified everyone involved. "I knew it was happening [and] I screamed — at myself!" she admitted. Her co-star, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, confessed that watching it got him, too, telling Pop Sugar, "I watched [that episode] the other day, and I was so, so scared. I screamed, and I was still scared, so I screamed again."

If you shudder when watching a character die in a spectacularly gruesome way, spare a thought for the actor living the scene, especially when it comes to the cast of "The Walking Dead." The zombie show has delivered some of the most spectacularly gruesome deaths on TV, but maybe the most shudder-inducing of all was watching Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) gut Spencer (Austin Nichols) in broad daylight in season seven.

Nichols wasn't crazy about that moment, either. He was padded with a special chest plate and a bag filled with fake blood and guts, but Morgan had to use a real razor to split open the bag. "I was afraid that he would puncture the chest plate and actually cut me — because he comes at me really hard and really fast," Nichols told Entertainment Weekly. Luckily, Morgan got it right in the first and only take.

While dying was scary, coming back as a zombie was all fun. "It was cool to do ... all this fun stuff with the zombie make-up and zombie contacts," Nichols revealed, confirming what most "Dead" Heads long suspected. After his character's dramatic death scene was over, he said, "I just stood up and started screaming. And I just started yelling 'YEAH! That was awesome!'"

One of the first victims of the ever-growing Mindflayer in "Stranger Things" Season 3 was Heather the lifeguard, played by Francesca Reale. In a telepathic trance, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) finds Heather in a bathtub full of ice, where she pleads for help before being dragged down into the water by an unseen force.

Shooting the first half of the scene was creepy for Reale, who spent a day "drowning [herself]" (via Cinema Blend) in the bathtub. And things only got scarier. For the part of the scene where Heather is pulled underwater, Reale was in "a pool with a black bottom." She added that the darkness made it "terrifying" because she hates "any body of water that has a black bottom."

Adding to the waking nightmare, there was a mechanism attached to her foot which pulled her down. And she had to hold her arms above her head — like she was reaching for Eleven — and scream, both without creating bubbles, while keeping her eyes open. Reale admitted that "it was incredibly hard," but she said that she enjoyed the chance to do a stunt, and she's game for more (perhaps with the lights on.)

Vampires aren't afraid of much (except retribution from the vampiric council and throwing a bad orgy), but the humans who play them have very real concerns. For example, Natasia Demetriou, who plays the vampire Nadja in the mockumentary series "What We Do in the Shadows," didn't feel so hot when a fire effect didn't go as planned.

In a scene in the season one finale, three Staten Island vampires visit a church where they slowly start to burn up. Demetriou's hands really were set on fire, and she wore gloves covered in special paste that's supposed to burn without damaging skin. But the fire started getting out of control. "They thought I was just doing it as part of the scene," she explained to Stuff. "So it was like a good five seconds of me thinking I was going to lose my hand."

Showrunner Jemaine Clement thought the accidental effect looked great. But while, say, Tom Cruise's on-set injury didn't slow that famous former vampire down, Demetriou understandably broke with her character under fire. "I definitely ruined it by screaming, 'help, help' in my [English] accent," she admitted.

"Bates Motel" is overbooked with brutal murders (not to mention other acts of violence), but the scene that truly scared Vera Farmiga — who played unstable matriarch Norma — happened in the very first episode.

The motel's former owner, Keith Summers (W. Earl Brown), breaks into the kitchen and sexually assaults Norma, but her son, Norman (Freddie Highmore), knocks him out. The pair handcuff Summers, and Norman goes to get the medical kit to treat his mother's injuries. While he's gone, Summers wakes up and tries to attack Norma, who grabs a kitchen knife and stabs him repeatedly.

The whole scene is disturbing to watch, but the part that freaked out Farmiga was the moment right before she had to pretend to stab Brown. During the "Bates Motel: After Hours" show, she explained, "The actor was saying the most perverse things to me in order to instigate me to sock it to him," including the incredibly eerie line, "You liked it." 

"It was creepy," Farmiga said, a sentiment that sums up the whole series.

"True Blood's" Tara Thornton went through a lot in her relatively short life. But the scariest scene for actress Rutina Wesley was the one in which Sookie (Anna Paquin) and Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) bury Tara, hoping to bring her back as a vampire after she was killed saving Sookie.

Tara is dead in the scene, but Wesley definitely wasn't. And like anyone with a pulse, she didn't enjoy being buried alive. In fact, she nearly had a panic attack. But since dead people can't breathe, much less hyperventilate, she had to stay as still as possible. As she explained to Flare, "I remember my heart was beating so fast. ... It took all my focus to not move an inch when the final shovel of dirt was thrown on my face. I think I might have actually inhaled some dirt that day."

Although it was terrifying at the time, Wesley admitted to Vulture, "It turned out to be a beautiful shot. That's how you get it, you do it for real." That's an admirable level of commitment, but maybe request fake dirt next time.

Debuting on The CW in January 2017, the very first sequence in the very first episode of "Riverdale" establishes that this dark teen mystery soap would play a lot differently than the old-fashioned, squeaky-clean Archie Comics upon which it was based. After some ominous establishing shots of the titular city, the action switches to the banks of the Sweetwater River, where identical twins Jason (Trevior Stines) and Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), dressed in white, board a small boat and head out, a journey that Jason won't survive and which will leave his sister traumatized.

Even shooting that bit of fiction was tough for Petsch, who has a pronounced phobia of deep, large bodies of water, owing in part to a long-ago accident in a glass-bottomed boat. "I assumed they'd use a stunt double in the boat. When I got to set, they were like, 'So we're gonna put you in a wetsuit,'" she recalled to Glamour. Increasing her apprehension was that costar Stines was in charge of operating the boat, and he'd never done that before. "I was having a panic attack. No one knew I was freaking out." Petsch said. "I was terrified of stepping in the boat, but then I got in and Trevor was amazing. It was great therapy, but I was still terrified."

Having already explored issues like mental illness, addiction, desperation, objectification, predatory behavior, and death, HBO's provocative teen drama "Euphoria" went to some very serious and intimidating places throughout its first season. Filming that first set of episodes ended with the cast and crew literally filming at a seriously intimidating place: in and around a decommissioned medical institution that was reportedly and supposedly still occupied. "We were on these weird grounds, out there shooting, all night, and no one mentioned that the grounds were haunted," actor Algee Smith (Chris McKay) told Collider. Co-star Sydney Sweeney (Cassie Howard) explained that "Euphoria" filmed by an old mental hospital, supposedly closed up after a resident escape led to the deaths of 40 staff members. "And now they say the place is haunted," Sweeney said. "We were exploring, and all of the lights were off and we went into the basement, where there was a morgue. It was the creepiest place that I've ever been to, and we were filming there, all day and all night. Nobody mentioned, 'Hey, people get murdered.'"

In 1979, only the second ever adaptation of a Stephen King book hit screens — a "Salem's Lot" miniseries, about a small town ravaged by vampires. Directed by Tobe Hooper, better known for "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Poltergeist," the "Salem's Lot" limited series featured one of the scariest and thus most indelible TV moments of the time. Young Ralphie Glick (Ron Scribner), transformed into a pale-faced, monstrous vampire, floats outside the bedroom window of his brother Danny (Brad Savage) and scratches at the glass, imploring him to let him in for some inevitably chilling savagery.

The look in Scribner's eyes is complicated and inscrutable, and it came not from an actor trying to best convey his character, but rather extreme discomfort. "It was probably the pain from the contact lenses digging into my eyeballs," he told Vanity Fair. Danny ultimately doesn't survive his brother's vampirism, and this led to Savage having to film a funeral scene as an undead boy. Seemingly dead, Danny hangs out in a coffin until he can drink the blood of gravedigger Mike Ryerson (Geoffrey Lewis). "Honestly, out of my whole childhood career, that was the creepiest experience," he said. "They literally put me in a coffin and lowered me down eight, 10 feet into a hole," where Lewis shoveled dirt onto the coffin when he was inside it. "That was probably the most damage done to my psyche."