‘Whoops’ doesn’t cover this one. Or even a heartfelt ‘sorry’. An on-set prop mix-up on a Marvel movie saw a fight scene take a terrifying turn when the film’s lead actor accidentally stabbed his co-star while filming.
In The Punisher, Tom Jane plays Frank Castle, a grief-stricken, former FBI agent out for some revenge; one particular scene sees him face off against an assassin called The Russian, played by WWE pro-wrestler Kevin Nash. Cue a big fight scene during which Jane’s Castle stabs Nash’s murderous thug. But when it came time for the actors to film their bloody showdown, things got a little bit real. When the cameras rolled, the weapon that had been left in place for Jane to use in the scene was not a stunt one but a real and very sharp blade.
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“That was a bad day,” Jane told The Rich Eisen Show podcast. “I was swinging around, and grabbing the prop knife, and … I plunge it into his chest … and it stabs him, and it goes in.”
Jane described his disbelief, saying, “I’m looking at the knife, I’m looking at him. Kevin, he’s just looking down at me, and there’s a knife sticking out of his chest … Yeah, that was rough”.
(The Punisher is available to stream on Tubi)
Nash, luckily, was fine and his very good-natured response only made Jane feel “worse” by being “so nice about it … He just sat there, looked at the knife, looked at me, and shook his head. I sent him a couple cases of beer, if I remember right.”
Scarily, almost exactly the same thing happened during the 2010 filming of the finale of Lost, during which star Matthew Fox was actually stabbed by actor Terry O’Quinn with another knife muddle. Shooting the climactic scene required O’Quinn to work with both a fake and a real knife, director Jack Bender told Vulture. You can probably guess what happened in the heat of filming the characters’ big showdown.
O’Quinn thought he had the prop knife until “I plunged it into Matthew’s side … I stabbed him with a real knife”.
What saved Fox was that he was wearing padding under his costume.
The absolute king of the onset near-disaster is Tom Cruise, who has come close to very serious injury, if not death, via sword, car, and co-star on a number of occasions.
The making of 2003’s The Last Samurai required Cruise to train for eight months, still not enough prep to prevent him from nearly being decapitated. During one battle scene with co-star Hiroyuki Sanada, “he was approaching me and then suddenly his horse hit me and his sword was an inch from my neck,” Cruise has said.
The crew, Sanada has said, “all screamed because they thought Tom’s head would fly off.”
“I just managed to stop my sword an inch from his neck. It was so hard. I was drenched in sweat! My God! But Tom never blinked!”
Luckily Cruise’s head stayed on so, the following year, he could make 2004’s Collateral during which Jamie Foxx nearly “killed my man”.
In the Michael Mann movie, Foxx plays a taxi driver who forms an unlikely connection with Cruise’s hit man. One scene required Foxx to drive his cab into Cruise’s car but he misjudged the speed: “I hit the gas, the cab goes straight head on into [Cruise’s] Mercedes and the Mercedes lifts off the ground and goes off the set”.
The crew unanimously dashed to check on Cruise first.
History repeated itself during the making of 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, with Emily Blunt admitting to Conan O’Brien that she had “almost killed” Cruise while filming a scene that required complicated driving manoeuvres.
“I hear him going [quietly], ‘Brake. Brake. Brake. Em, brake the car! Brake the car!’
“And I left it too late and so drove us into a tree and I almost killed Tom Cruise”.
Luckily, Mr Mission: Impossible seems nearly indestructible.
It’s not just action movies that can put their stars in harm’s way. Gerard Butler revealed to Drew Barrymore a few years ago that while shooting the 2007 weepie P.S. I Love You, one scene went so badly wrong he sent co-star Hilary Swank to the hospital.
The sequence in question required Butler, dressed in just boxer shorts and suspenders, to dance sexily around a room, including at one point crawling towards Swank. For a full day and a half they filmed, Butler has said, until one of the alligator clips attached to the suspenders “flies over my head, hits her in the head [and] slashes her head.” The crew swarmed into action to care for the bleeding Swank, while Butler was left sitting in very little clothing and in tears. “I just started crying, I was like … ‘I’ve just scared Hilary Swank, I nearly took her eye out’ …”I almost killed her”.
(The Punisher is available to stream on Tubi)