Uma Thurman was almost killed in a car crash on the set of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Photo / supplied
Uma Thurman was almost killed in a car crash on the set of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Photo / supplied
An actor was almost crushed to death, another almost drowned and one star was punched so hard he spent five days in intensive care. If you think actors have it easy, think again.
A number of big name stars have had near-death experiences when making movies, but thankfully they all lived to tell the tales.
Harrison Ford
"They closed a f***ing door on me!" That's what Harrison Ford told Jimmy Fallon about the incident that left him with a broken leg on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The veteran actor went into further detail on The Jonathan Ross Show, saying: "They built a f***ing great hydraulic door which closed at light speed and somebody said, 'Ooh I wonder what this is?'
"And the door came down and hit me on my left hip because I was turned to my right. And then it flung my left leg up and it dislocated my ankle and as it drove me down to the floor, my legs slapped on the ramp up to the Millennium Falcon and broke both bones in my left leg."
Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photo / supplied
Ford wasn't the only one injured during the incident.
"I'm trying to lift this door and I hear a pop (in my back) and I go, 'Oh, that's weird.' So I go to the doctor a couple of days alter and he goes, 'Oh, you have a broken back.'"
The actor was seriously injured during the shooting of the film when a car she was driving crashed into a tree. Thurman told The New York Times earlier this year that she never wanted to drive the car in the first place and asked director Quentin Tarantino to use a stunt woman instead.
"Quentin came in my trailer and didn't like to hear no, like any director," Thurman said.
"He said: 'I promise you the car is fine. It's a straight piece of road. Hit 40mph or your hair won't blow the right way and I'll make you do it again.'
"But that was a death box that I was in. The seat wasn't screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road."
The car skidded out of control on the sand and ploughed into a palm tree.
"The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me. I felt this searing pain and thought, 'Oh my God. I'm never going to walk again," she told The New York Times.
"When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset.
"Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn't feel he had tried to kill me."
In response to Thurman's interview in the Times, Tarantino said the incident was "heartbreaking" and added, "Beyond one of the biggest regrets of my career, it is one of the biggest regrets of my life."
Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa. Photo / supplied
Sylvester Stallone ended up in intensive care after a fight scene with Dolph Lundgren got a little out of hand.
As the actor explained during An Evening With Sylvester Stallone, he urged Lundgren to "go for it" during a fight scene and to "really try to knock me out".
Stallone said Lundgren punched him in the chest so hard that he had to stop filming for the day.
"Later that night my blood pressure goes up to 260, I go to hospital, they put me in an emergency jet and fly me back to America," Stallone said. "Next thing I know I'm in intensive care for five days with nuns walking around.
"He hit my heart so hard that it banged against my ribs and started to swell, and that usually happens in car accidents."
Lundgren shared his memories of the incident with news.com.au in 2014 and said he was unaware that he'd almost killed his co-star.
"When we got back to LA they said, 'Sly's in the hospital, you get two weeks off,'" Lundgren said. "And I'm like, 'two weeks off? That's great. What happened?' And then I found out that supposedly I did it."
In The Mummy, Fraser's character Rick O'Connell leads an expedition to the City of the Dead in Egypt. And that's almost where the actor ended up when a hanging stunt went wrong.
"I was hanging from the noose standing on a board. Take one, and Steve (Sommers, the writer-director) said, 'The noose doesn't match the stunt guys. Can we bring up the tension a little bit, and we'll have it.'
Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in The Mummy. Photo / supplied
"They did the take and the camera was on a spin that goes 180-degrees and it shows the prisoners shouting, and then comes down on me at the end of the noose.
"I figured, 'I'll get oxygen and hold my breath,' and I was up on my toes and something went wrong — and the next thing I knew, I was waking up."
The Aussie actor almost drowned during the making of Now You See Me.
Talking about the near-death experience to On Demand Entertainment, Fisher said: "My character is submerged in a tank and piranhas are dropped upon her head … even though I had a quick release magnetic thing on my handcuffs, the chain that went between my ankles and my wrists was not able to be broken. It got stuck underneath the slat and I was trapped.
"I was very scared. I was banging and saying, 'set me free,' and everyone just thought I was doing fabulous acting. They thought I was being Meryl Streep in the tank, actually I was drowning.
"All I was thinking about was me on the autopsy table, bloated in a swimming costume with heels and how humiliating that would be."
