Movie Scenes That Almost Killed The Stunt Double

There are a small number of gutsy Hollywood stars who insist on doing their own stunt work (Tom Cruise has almost been killed multiple times making movies), but most A-listers are happy to hand the really dangerous stuff over to the professionals. Stunt doubles are always in demand in Tinseltown, where a pro can expect to earn a reported average of $70,000 a year. That figure can rise very quickly depending on the situation, however, as in the stunt game higher risk equals higher reward.

The biggest fee ever paid for a single stunt went to Dar Robinson, who was given $150,000 to jump off Toronto's CN Tower in place of Highpoint star Christopher Plummer back in 1979. He nailed the jump twice without any complications, but not every stunt has a happy ending. Near brushes with death are an occupational hazard for Hollywood stunt doubles—and these were some of the most hazardous.

The hoverboard scene is one of the most memorable moments from Back to the Future Part II, though for stunt performer Cheryl Wheeler, it brings back painful memories. Wheeler was almost killed shooting the sequence, in which local meathead Griff and his cronies are tossed through the glass window of a clock tower. One stuntwoman had already quit over the scene, and Wheeler became concerned after a handful of last-minute changes were made to the rig, as explained in Caseen Gaines' book We Don't Need Roads (excerpted by Gizmodo).

"Are you sure all the marks are right from the other day?" Wheeler asked stunt coordinator Walter Scott. "How are you sure everything is exactly the same?" Scott (a veteran in the stunt industry) accused her of getting cold feet and threatened to put a male stunt performer in her clothes for the scene, but being new to the business and wanting to make an impression, she reluctantly agreed.

Instead of crashing through the sugar glass window, Wheeler collided with a stone pillar and was dropped 30 feet onto the concrete below, missing the fall mats entirely. "I was way in the corner, right next to the camera where Cheryl should've been," fellow stunt performer Gary Morgan recalled. "I opened my eyes and I said, 'Where's Cheryl?' and somebody pointed outside. I got up and Cheryl was laying on the concrete and the pool of blood by her head was getting bigger. I thought she was dead."

Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich said that it was a "miracle" her double survived an incident that took place on the set of 2016's The Final Chapter, an incident that left the British stuntwoman in a coma. "A terrible accident rocked our set on Saturday the 5th of September," the actress revealed on Facebook. "My incredibly talented stunt double, Olivia Jackson, collided with a camera crane while performing a motorcycle stunt and it put her in the hospital with severe, multiple injuries."

After she regained consciousness, Jackson also took to Facebook to reveal the horrifying extent of the damage. "Two weeks in a coma, brain bleed, brain swelling, severed main artery in the neck, crushed and degloved face, several broken ribs, paralyzed arm, shattered scapula, broken clavicle, broken humerus, broken radius and ulna, with an open wound and a 7.5 piece of bone missing, amputated thumb, torn fingers, five nerves torn out of the spinal cord," she said. "Not my funnest day on set."

In the end one of Jackson's arms had to be amputated and she still has several surgeries to go. The resilient Brit posted a picture of her "twisted upper body" to her Instagram feed in January 2017, claiming that her off-centered neck is the most painful part. "I don't mean to moan, but sometimes I just want to crawl out of my own skin and all the pains in it," she added.

Australian stuntman Scott McLean was doubling for funnyman Ed Helms in The Hangover Part II when he suffered a critical head injury during a car chase, forcing hospital staff to put him in a medically induced coma. "There was an accident involving a truck and a car on the second unit set of The Hangover Part II near Bangkok, Thailand," Warner Bros. said in a statement via The Hollywood Reporter. "An ambulance immediately took the injured stuntman to the local hospital."

The accident took place during the filming of the scene in which Stu (Helms), Phil (Bradley Cooper), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) are being chased by Russian gangsters after stealing their monkey. They swerve through traffic as Stu hangs out of the back passenger window attempting to pull the monkey inside, narrowly missing a truck as it comes around the corner in front of them. The drivers involved got their marks wrong, and McLean's head was hit by the truck.

According to a Daily Mail report, McLean (who had previously performed stunts in the Star Wars and Matrix franchises) was feared dead by his colleagues after the impact, and while he ultimately escaped with his life, his lawyers claim he suffered permanent brain injuries. "There was so much damage," his wife (also a stunt performer) said. "He was a mess. He used to look after me, now it's my turn to look after him for a change."

Using fake weapons in battle scenes is a lot safer than using real ones, though sometimes they can ruin an otherwise perfect shot—remember Hamish's floppy rubber axe during the emotional final charge in Braveheart? That was exactly what David Ayer was trying to avoid in his gritty 2014 WWII flick, Fury. Brad Pitt stars as Sgt Don "Wardaddy" Collier alongside an ensemble cast including Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña. The men got to know each other intimately over the course of the shoot, and a large part of that was down to the fistfights they were encouraged to have.

Ayer put the cast through an intensive boot camp and had them partake in heavy sparring as a unique method of bonding before the shoot took place in England, which led to a few flared tempers (LaBeouf admitted that he and Peña butted heads pretty hard at times). While that violence was all staged, there was one moment which wasn't, and it left a stuntman needing an airlift to Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. The 35-year-old was stabbed with a bayonet during a battle scene, though the nine-inch blade luckily went straight through his shoulder.

"There has been an accident between two professional stuntmen which happened in a rehearsed action sequence," a spokeswoman for the production confirmed, adding that while it was "obviously very unfortunate," the man in question was "laughing and talking" as he was loaded into the helicopter.

Extra and background work might be little more than an interesting hobby to most, but for some, it's the first baby steps into an acting career. This was how Gabriela Cedillo felt when she got a job as a passing driver in Michael Bay's third Transformers installment, 2011's Dark of the Moon. Cedillo was asked to take part in a scene involving stunt cars being towed at high speed by flatbed trucks, though when the welding connecting the cars to those trucks failed, she was almost fatally injured.

As she drove her car along a cordoned-off road, the trucks passed her on the opposite side traveling at 50mph. Tragedy struck when one of the brackets attached to a stunt car in tow came loose, smashing through Cedillo's windscreen and hitting her in the head, leaving her with permanent brain damage and paralyzed down one side. She also needed to have her left eye stitched shut, according to details of her lawsuit obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The stunt (which had an unsuccessful test run just a day before) ended up costing the studios behind the film a small fortune. Cedillo was eventually awarded $18.5 million in damages, though her legal team claimed that DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures did everything they could to avoid paying out. "I think they were well aware of what was going on out there," The Guardian quoted Cedillo's lawyer Todd Smith as saying.