Movies That Permanently Damaged Actors' Bodies

Jared Leto has lost weight for films such as "Requiem for a Dream" and "Dallas Buyers Club," but it was gaining weight for the 2007 indie "Chapter 27" that really did a number on the actor.

Playing Mark Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon, Leto admitted he gained so much weight so abruptly that he suffered gout. "Towards the end of the shoot, one of the glaring issues was the pain I had with my feet," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I had a wheelchair because it was so painful. My body was in shock from the amount of weight I gained. It took about a year to get back to a place that felt semi-normal. I don't know if I'll ever be back to the place I was physically."

Well, at least dying his hair green and donning metal teeth to play the Joker in "Suicide Squad" left no indelible marks.

While filming a torture scene for the 2005 film "Syriana," George Clooney cracked his head open during a stunt and severely injured his spine—a mishap that's had severe lasting effects on the acclaimed leading man's sense of physical well-being.

He told Rolling Stone at the time that the injury was so bad, he considered taking his own life. Doctors couldn't quite pinpoint where the injury was at first, but finally noticed fluid leaking from Clooney's spine, and realized that the condition was more serious than anyone had thought. The actor later revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he was forced to take strong pain medication as part of a long process that turned a positive corner when he finally turned to therapy, explaining, "I went to a pain-management guy whose idea was, 'You can't mourn for how you used to feel, because you're never going to feel that way again.'"

Sylvester Stallone knows a thing or two about on-set battle wounds. "I grade the quality of a film by the intensity of the injuries," he once joked. "When I shot "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot," I never got hurt. Through "Rambo" and "The Expendables," I break my neck and my spine and I dislocate both shoulders." In 2014's "The Expendables 3," in which he reprised his role as mercenary Barney Ross, Stallone admitted he suffered his worst on-set fall, permanently injuring his back. "I... had some metal put in there," he noted, "so if you hear any squeaking, it's not my shoes but my back. But I'm getting better."

The third "Expendables" also almost killed co-star Jason Statham. While driving a truck on a loading dock, the brakes failed and it plunged 60 feet into the Black Sea. Thankfully, Statham — who once competed as an Olympic diver — was able to get free and swim to safety.

The same type of injury also befell Bruce Willis while he was making his action thriller breakthrough "Die Hard." According to the actor, after firing off a fateful round, he suffered "two-thirds partial hearing loss" in his left ear. He added that now has the "tendency to say, 'Whaaa?'" 

Rumer Willis, his oldest daughter with ex-wife Demi Moore, concurred, explaining (via ContactMusic) that the reason her dad isn't as talkative while promoting a movie is because he sometimes struggles to hear the questions. "I think part of the problem is sometimes he can't hear... because he shot a gun off next to his ear when he was doing 'Die Hard' a long time ago, so he has partial hearing loss in his ears. If me and my sisters get together and he's at a dinner table and we start talking about fashion and things, the poor guy..." Indeed.

It comes as no surprise Michelle Yeoh injured herself during the spectacular "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." With all the incredible stunt choreography involved, there had to be a misstep, and at one point in filming, Yeoh landed wrong and her knee gave out. She told USA Today about the experience, recalling, "The first action sequence was very intensive. I was doing a forward jump kick that I've done thousands of times but I had a mishap landing... I thought, 'I'm fine, I can keep going.' You have to give it your all because celluloid is forever. But I knew it was bad when I turned left and my leg kept swinging right." 

Sure enough, the action star completely tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her knee. Yeoh had to have surgery and months of physical therapy, and while she was able to recover, she admitted, "You never get all the way back to what it was."

In her 2010 action thriller "Salt," Angelina Jolie plays a CIA officer accused of being a Russian spy who must prove her innocence while on the run. To prep for fight scenes, Jolie had to learn a combination of Muay Thai and Krav Maga, and some of her stunts included walking on a narrow ledge atop a 12-story building and jumping off a highway underpass onto a moving truck. But it was a "ridiculously" easy scene, she said, that caused her to permanently scar her face. Speaking at Comic-Con, she said it happened during a scene that involved her rolling onto the floor. Her stunt trainer Simon Crane told Us Weekly, "During her final fight with Liev [Schrieber] ... She had to dive through an opening door firing a gun ... as she carried the sequence on, she rushed into a corner piece of a set and bumped her head." At least they got the shot.

Production on the final chapter in the "Maze Runner" series was suspended indefinitely due to a horrific on-set accident involving Dylan O'Brien. The franchise's young star suffered severe brain trauma when a stunt involving a motorcycle went wrong and he "broke most of the right side of [his] face," as he put it to The Salt Lake Tribune.

"[I have] four plates that will be a part of me forever," he said. "I feel really lucky to have come away from it — in terms of coming away from it at all on the day, and really how my face has healed." He went on to thank his "brilliant doctor," adding, "He salvaged a lot of what I used to look like. To anybody who saw me after it happened, I think it's really astonishing how well everything healed and how my doctors fixed me up."

Her 2016 hit "The Shallows" proved Blake Lively had some genuine action chops, and she was duly rewarded with a part fronting her own spy thriller, "The Rhythm Section."

Sadly, things went south for Lively, as an on-set injury she sustained while filming an action sequence in late 2017 caused the film to halt production. Sources informed The Hollywood Reporter that Lively's hand injury wasn't thought to be all that serious at first, though the surgery she underwent after sustaining it apparently failed to fix the issue.

Further surgeries followed, with both Paramount and Lively awaiting instruction from surgeons on how best to proceed. They had to take a more patient approach than they'd planned, but it paid off in the long run: in early 2018, she was cleared to return to the set, and filming resumed later in the year.

Daniel Craig wasn't the only person on the set of "Spectre" to suffer permanent damage. The production maimed veteran assistant director Terry Madden, who sued for $3.5 million after sustaining an injury he described as career-ending.

According to a report by Deadline, Madden was filming in the Austrian Alps, picking up shots with a camera mounted on a Range Rover. The Rover spun out of control and struck Madden, crushing his legs and forcing him off the production with multiple fractures and nerve damage that ultimately required several surgeries. "To have a career you worked hard over many years to build up, taken away within a few seconds in this horrendous accident, has been soul destroying," he said.

Between Craig's injury and Madden's, one has to wonder just how much of the film's budget ended up getting diverted to pay out for their multiple surgeries. It's a good thing the U.K. has universal health care, but these Bond movies are kind of abusing it.

The star of the DC Universe may look like an unbeatable, impossible-to-hurt superhero because he often plays one, but Jason Momoa is only human. After his star-making role in the first "Aquaman" movie in 2018 became a global box office blockbuster, Warner Bros. quickly ordered a sequel, "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom." Throughout the filming of the physically demanding and stunt-heavy action movie, Momoa suffered for his art, chalking up his vulnerability to his advancing age.

"I'm getting old," the then-42-year-old actor said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in 2021. "I messed up my eyes. I just got something in it that kinda cut it up, and then I've gotta get surgery, I have a hernia, I've got ribs out. I'm just getting beat up." 

In addition to what he confirmed was a scratched cornea and hernia, Momoa revealed to Yahoo! that he wound up with a facial scar after a fight scene in the 2018 movie "Braven" went wrong. "I got knocked out," he said. "A stunt guy hit me. He blindsided me. We didn't make eye contact, and he hit me before I could grab for him, and everything went black." Momoa required hospitalization for the incident and shooting on "Braven" was put on hold for a day.

Burt Reynolds was among the most bankable movie stars in America in the 1970s. He made a name for himself in comedy-laced action spectaculars like "Hooper," "The Longest Yard," and "Smokey and the Bandit," but his first major role in a movie was in the hit dark drama "Deliverance." Reynolds led an ensemble cast in the film about a river rafting trip that goes dangerously awry, such as when his character's occupied small boat violently goes over a waterfall. After watching the crew shoot the scene with a dummy, Reynolds volunteered to film it for real, seeing little danger in doing so because the production had control of the falls via a dam farther up the river.

"Then they let the water go and I heard this sound — I dream sometimes of the water coming — I looked around and there was a tidal wave coming at me," Reynolds told The Hollywood Reporter of his memories of shooting that scene. "I went over the falls and the first thing that happened, I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone." More than 45 years later, the actor still felt pain from the injury.

A lot can go wrong on a movie set, even on a relatively low-tech comedy. In 1986, Steve Martin (and Martin Short and Chevy Chase) starred in "Three Amigos!," an action-tinged comedy about three silent-era Western film stars who get stuck in a terrorized Mexican village and have to save its residents who think they are the brave heroes they play in the movies — not spoiled and cowardly actors.

Martin's character, Lucky Day, deals with a number of uncomfortable situations to which he's unsuited, including plenty of shootouts. That may have led to a case of tinnitus — a persistent, high-pitched, and grating ringing of the ears. The actor and comedian has suffered from the condition ever since the production of "Three Amigos!" but he thinks something else could've triggered it. 

"I blamed it on gunfire at the time but since then I realized it was just my destiny after listening to music too loud my whole life," he told Pitchfork. Prior to his move into acting, Martin was a popular stand-up who played giant, and very loud, arenas. "It was like being in a football stadium." Martin says he's learned to deal with the tinnitus. "It becomes your natural background noise."

In "The Wizard of Oz," the 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum's fantasy novel, Jack Haley played the Tin Man, the friendly metal monster on his way to see the Wizard to acquire a heart. However, Haley wasn't studio MGM's first choice for the role or even the first actor cast. 

According to Vanity Fair, Buddy Ebsen (best known for his later leading gigs on "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Barnaby Jones") was hired first. When rehearsing in makeup and under studio lights, according to the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, the crew repeatedly dusted Ebsen's face with aluminum dust to keep his white grease paint from running. One night during the rehearsal period, Ebsen awoke with painful cramps in his limbs, his face had turned blue, and he couldn't breathe. The actor spent two weeks of hospitalization in an oxygen tent — his body had to divest itself of the large amount of toxic aluminum sitting in his lungs. With his recovery taking longer than they liked, MGM fired Ebsen and installed Haley.

Another cast member of "The Wizard of Oz" also experienced a severe medical reaction. Ray Bolger portrayed the brainless Scarecrow, and on the final day of shooting, he took off his rubber-and burlap-based prosthetic mask for the last time, the one that made his face look like it was made of burlap. He discovered that he had burlap-like scars all over his chin and mouth.