Actor Injuries That Were Written Into Storylines

The show must go on, as anyone in show business knows. No matter what happens, actors will soldier through it to bring the movie, episode, play, or skit to a solid ending. Of course, actors are human beings, not computer simulations. Human beings have human bodies which break down, get sick, and on occasion, outright break. When this happens, directors, producers, and writers are faced with the task of how to handle it.

Sometimes, for any number of reasons, the injury gets written into the storyline. Maybe it's too late to recast, or too far into production to pause. Other times, a writer comes up with a workaround that's genuinely compelling. A good actor, or at least one associated strongly enough with the property in question, isn't worth losing, and it's often more efficient to just find creative ways of making a real-world injury work. These are a few times when actors' injuries were successfully integrated into storylines of movies or TV shows, from broken legs to mysterious scars.

About halfway through Se7en, Detective David Mills (played by Brad Pitt) chases someone down a rainy street. While shooting the scene, Pitt slid on the hood of a car and smashed into the windshield. Producers on set didn't want to get into detail about what they saw, but it was apparently a gruesome scene. Pitt severed a tendon in his hand and required emergency stitches. He returned to set just a few days later.

Quite a lot of the movie still had to be shot by this point. This role was expected — correctly, as it turns out — to add some serious credibility to the freshly-minted Sexiest Man Alive. As such, they wrote his cast into the script. Mills wears a cast for the rest of the movie: Pitt's chase-scene injury became Mills' chase-scene injury. For scenes that were shot out of sequence, the cast was simply concealed.

Friends' third season episode, "The One Where No One's Ready," is a strange one. It's a bottle episode in a series that doesn't have many episodes of that type, and one that takes place in what comes very close to real time. The crowd in attendance was flown in from across the country, made up of contest winners from a Diet Coke-sponsored contest. It's also the episode in which Matt LeBlanc got injured during an otherwise innocuous stunt.

By LeBlanc's telling, Joey and Chandler were supposed to both jump over a coffee table and land on a nice big chair. "I don't think," said LeBlanc, "it even qualifies as a stunt." Somehow, LeBlanc landed incorrectly: He walked backstage and realized that his shoulder was not where it should be. Production was shut down, LeBlanc went to the hospital, and the entire audience got sent home — much to the chagrin of Diet Coke, who had to fly them back out for make-up episodes. The writers handled LeBlanc's injury by putting Joey in a sling for a few episodes, explained away as the result of a very in-character action: Joey's decision to jump on the bed.

Isaac Jaffe was one of Aaron Sorkin's first big Leader-with-a-capital-L characters. The managing editor of the titular Sports Night, Jaffe is the voice of moral clarity among the staff, and the glue that keeps everyone together. His actor, Robert Guillaume, was regarded similarly by the actual cast and crew of the show. As such, it was a shock when Guillaume suffered a stroke on set.

When Guillaume's condition cleared up, Sorkin "promised [Guillaume] if he wanted to come back to work that [Sorkin] would simply give the character a stroke." Guillaume survived his ordeal with no impediments to his speech, and the knowledge that he could come back gave him hope. As promised, Guillaume's stroke became Issac's stroke. The character disappears for several episodes, and is welcomed back at the end of the first season. Season two begins with Isaac dealing with the stroke affecting his performance.

Lionel Barrymore had settled into being typecast as "obstinate old man who secretly cares" by the 1930s. The most prominent of these roles was Grandpa Martin Vanderhof in Frank Capra's 1938 classic, You Can't Take It With You. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, a few changes occurred in the transition from play to big-screen motion picture. One of these is the presence of a cast and crutches for Grandpa Vanderhof. This was the result of Barrymore's health issues being written into the script.

Barrymore had begun suffering from a variety of ailments by the mid-1930s, most prominently arthritis. Later movies, such as It's A Wonderful Life, would confine him to a chair from the get-go. 1938 was a different story — between being in the early stages of his illness and the character already being established, some tweaks were needed. As such, the in-universe explanation is that Grandpa Vanderhof broke his leg after sliding down the banister with his granddaughter. Thus, the crutches and cast.

Harrison Ford got his distinctive chin scar years before he became a star. Back when he was just an average department store employee, he tried to put on his seat belt while driving and slammed into a telephone phone. His chin smacked into the steering wheel, which led to the scar. A scary situation for sure, but Ford calls the accident "a mundane way of earning" the scar. Not sure we'd call a car crash necessitating minor surgery "mundane," but it's certainly calmer than all the plane crashes he got into later in life.

Of course, having a few marks helps when you're an action star — it adds to the "tough guy" image. As such, his scar was worked into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Young Indy, played by the late River Phoenix, gets the scar after using his iconic whip for the first time.

Amitabh Bachchan is one of the biggest stars in Bollywood history. He has over 200 credits to his name and was the most prominent actor on the subcontinent in the 1970s and 80s. His work is revered not just in India, but worldwide, and has earned him many awards. He also accidentally started a fashion statement by integrating an injury into a couple of his movies.

In 1984, Bachchan nearly blew off his left hand during Diwali when a firecracker he was holding went off unexpectedly. He required extensive surgery, made worse by the fact that the injured hand is his dominant one. He still had two movies to make, however — Bachchan's shooting schedule was relentless. As such, in Inquilaab and Sharaabi, he keeps his injured hand in his pocket, and wildly gesticulates with the other. Many fans mistakenly thought this was a deliberate affectation — a testament to the actor's sterling reputation and skill.