Yahoo Lifestyle 17 Times Actors Got Injured On Set (And How It Was Written Into The Show)
While filming, actors often find themselves in unusual situations, such as performing a stunt or wearing a complicated costume. Sometimes, these circumstances lead to accidental injuries, and oftentimes, production has to figure out how to work an actor's injury into the show.
Here are 17 actors who got injured while filming popular TV shows:
1.While filming Bridgerton Season 3, Claudia Jessie broke her wrist. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said, "I'm an idiot. It's my own fault."
To cover up her cast, the costume department got creative.
Here's a closer look at her "summer muff":
Watch Claudia hilariously recount the whole story below, starting at the 2:20 mark:
2.While filming the Friends episode "The One Where No One's Ready," Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder.
Here's what the scene Matt described ending up looking like in the episode:
He told Jimmy Kimmel Live, "I did a few episodes in a sling. And they wrote it into the show as Joey was jumping on the bed."
Watch Matt share the entire story below, starting at the 3:30 mark:
3.While performing a stunt for the second episode of The Veil, Elisabeth Moss fractured a vertebra. In 2024, she told Variety, "The [scene] you see in the show is actually the second time we shot it, about six weeks later. The first time we shot it, I hit a wall the wrong way, let's just say, and ended up lying on the roof for a couple hours."
She continued, "We actually shot the next day at the airport; those are the Paris airport scenes you see [in the episode], and I actually have, like, a broken back. I tried to get them to put a green blanket over me and just VFX me out. I was like, 'Look, just put the green blanket over me, and you can scrub me out in post.'"
4.Priyanka Chopra Jonas did her own stunts for Quantico, which led to a small accident in 2017. On Live with Kelly, she said, "I hit my head on the bumper of a car and then on the floor."
She finished the scene then went to the ER, where a CAT scan showed her brain was bruised.
Priyanka also told Entertainment Tonight that her mom got the first flight to the US after learning her daughter got hurt. She said, "She doesn't need an excuse to see me, she comes every month. She is like, 'Concussion? I am there.'"
Here's the full clip, with this part starting at the 0:30 mark:
5.In the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 11 finale, Danny DeVito nearly drowned filming an underwater scene. His costar Charlie Day told Conan, "We almost killed him this year. We almost drowned him."
Charlie said that, after Danny was rescued, he "went straight home."
In 2017, Danny told Extra, "It was a good experience. Because I had lived a good life, and it flashed before my eyes in that scene."
Here's the full video of Charlie telling the story, with this part starting at the 0:30 mark:
6.In 2009, Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay told RedBook, "On October 16 [2008], I was doing a stunt chasing a bad guy. I'd always insisted on doing the stunts my own way, although I don't feel so strongly about that anymore. I jumped and landed on pads, but on the second take something happened — I just landed wrong. I got up and felt that something inside was not quite right. At first I thought I had the wind knocked out of me. I was angry with myself. Later, I thought maybe I'd pulled a muscle, but I didn't focus on the injury and kept expecting it to get better."
She continued, "I didn't know for three months that something was really wrong. At first I seemed to get better. But then two weeks later I had chest pains and shortness of breath...New Year's Day, we were walking on the beach out here near the house, and I felt this sharp pain, sort of like someone had stabbed me. I went down on one knee and just couldn't catch my breath. They took an X-ray and found that my right lung was 50 percent collapsed. I began to panic. I was so scared. I had a procedure hoping to stave off more serious surgery, but it didn't work, and I ended up in surgery about two weeks later."
When she was clear to return to work, "Everything was normal." However, she said, "Then, on March 5, it happened again. I was one out of 1,000, statistically."
7.In 2019, Ronda Rousey had a "freak accident" while filming 9-1-1. On Instagram, she said, "First take of the day a boat door fell on my hand, I thought I just jammed my fingers so I finished the take before looking (I know it sounds crazy, but I’m used to live audiences and never showing pain unless I’m supposed to)."
She continued, "After a break in the action, I told our director the situation and was rushed via ambulance to the hospital, where they promptly reattached my bone and tendon with a plate and screws. I returned to filming the next day and finished my scenes before returning home to recover. Modern medicine amazes me. I already had 50% range of motion back in three days."
She also shared a graphic picture of her injury; you can see it here.
8.When Michelle Williams appeared on The Masked Singer, a special effect malfunctioned during rehearsals. She got electrocuted, which split one of her boots open.
She told Entertainment Tonight, "During dress rehearsal, I'm standing on the platform, and they're trying to have...CO2 smoke come out...All I know is I looked down at my shoe, and the thing could talk."
9.In 2012, Kristin Chenoweth was severely injured on the set of The Good Wife. A decade later, in an essay for the book My Moment: 106 Women on Fighting for Themselves, she wrote, "As I stood on my mark, awaiting the next shot, a piece of lighting equipment crashed down on top of me and knocked me back into a curb. I was rushed by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. My injuries were severe. My ribs were cracked. My nose and some of my teeth were broken, and I had a skull fracture. And those were just the injuries that actually showed up on X-rays; never mind the nerve, tissue, and muscle damage I’d have to face in the weeks, months, and years that followed."
She said that, despite media interest, she decided to stay quiet about the accident because she didn't want to be "seen as weak and broken" and didn't want to be "a problem" for the network, CBS.
She wrote, "I was told that I’d never work again if I sued a major network. And that scared me. I let fear take over and did what so many people do — especially women—in the face of going up against someone or something more powerful than they are. I shrunk...[Years later] The injustice of it all finally began to take up more space inside of me than the fear did. Which is why I’ve recently begun speaking out about the chronic pain that I’ve dealt with since the accident. I guess it’s my way of taking a first step in fighting for myself. I’m telling my story about what happened, and I really don’t care if CBS never hires me again. They knew I was hurt really badly, but they exploited the power they held over a person like me."
10.During the Riverdale Season 1 finale scene where Archie saves Cheryl from drowning in a frozen river, KJ Apa broke his hand. He told TVLine, "That was a gnarly day of shooting, I’ll tell you that much. I wasn’t really punching the ice, but I got a little bit too excited. I was punching a foam mat … [that was] sitting on the ice. … It was cold, so I didn’t really feel it. It wasn’t until 20 minutes after that I realized I broke my hand."
"I didn’t tell anyone," he added.
Here's the scene:
11.While filming Cowboy Bebop in 2019, John Cho tore his ACL, which led to a months-long production shutdown. In 2021, he told Vulture, "It was real wonky. We had been shooting all night, and I was doing kind of an athletic move as the sun was coming up. It was probably a lack of sleep. Just a little move and [I was down]. So that was a low moment. It was 5:30 Saturday morning when I arrived at the emergency room, and it was filled with people who had gotten super drunk on Friday night and then got in a fight or fell and cracked their heads open. Ironically, a sobering experience."
He continued, "Then you have your surgery, and you go into rehab. I'm at home doing these knee exercises, and coming off the drugs, I was thinking about Cowboy Bebop. Doing those knee exercises, I was like, I gotta put my focus into this. So, I think that's also fueling my fear... It's really hard to tell what precipitates a freak injury like that, so I was determined to come back stronger. I felt very guilty that I had let the production down, and my cast and the crew in New Zealand had had a job, and then they didn't the next day. And I didn't feel that I could come back and half-ass this role. I had to take it deadly seriously. It was people's livelihood,s and I wanted every single person on the set to know that I was doing my best every single day. Which sounds Boy Scout-ish, but it was the truth. Maybe it was an apology that took a whole season for me to express. Because I felt so responsible for that upheaval in a whole crew's lives."
On The Late Late Show with James Corden, John described the other possibilities production considered before ultimately putting the show on hold.
Here's the full clip, with this part starting at the 0:45 mark:
12.In a 2013 Reddit AMA about Breaking Bad, Aaron Paul said, "Raymond Cruz, who played Tuco, gave me a concussion during the episode 'Grilled,' where Tuco takes Walt and Jesse to his shack in the middle of nowhere where we meet the famous [Hector Salamanca]. Tuco takes Jesse, and he throws him through the screen door outside, and if you watch it back, you'll notice that my head gets caught inside the wooden screen door, and it flips me around and lands me on my stomach, and the door splinters into a million pieces. Raymond just thought I was acting, so he continued and kicked me in the side and picked me up over his shoulder and threw me against the house, but in reality, I was pretty much unconscious the [entire] time."
He continued, "I kept pleading to him saying, 'Stop.' The next thing I know, I guess I blacked out, and I woke up to a flashlight in our eyes, and it was our medic. And then I hopped up, acting like nothing wrong, but it appeared like I was drunk, and I kept saying, 'Let's finish the scene.' But then my eye started swelling shut, so they took me to the hospital. Just another fun day on the set of Breaking Bad!"
Here's the scene:
13.Jared Padalecki broke his wrist while filming Supernatural Season 2, Episode 3, "Bloodlust." During a fan Q&A, he explained, "There was a scene where I get hit on the back of the head with a telephone. And I walk into a motel room, and I walk this way, and I sense something behind me. And so I turn, and there's a vampire, and I punch the vampire, but another one has come up behind me with a telephone and smacks me on the back of the head. So, as I fell, they're holding the camera there, and I fell, and I acted like I was passed out. At the last second, I kinda put my hand out to the side to catch myself...because the stuntman I had just 'knocked out' was there in front of me. So I put my hand out to catch myself, but the angle was incorrect, and so I snapped my wrist bone."
After he got up, they kept going. He said, "We went one more time. This time, I didn't fall on my hand. And we cut. It was the last shot of the day, and my hand was just hurting."
He said that, after his hand had been in pain for a few days, he got an x-ray, which determined it was broken. However, he had to finish shooting the episode before getting surgery and his cast.
His injury was written into the show. Series creator Eric Kripke told TV Guide, "We're making it work. Luckily, he gets in fights every episode so it is easy for him to break his hand. It turns out the zombie breaks his hand."
He continued, "I'm glad he's OK, and I'm glad it all worked out, but I do have to say there is a part of me that wished he broke his hand a little earlier because it would have made so much more sense to come out of the car crash with the broken arm. He survived getting T-boned by a semi going full speed, but a zombie broke his hand? We do what we always do we made a joke out of it and we had Dean give a funny reaction. Not once does it get in the way of the story."
14.While filming Doctor Who, Matt Smith reportedly damaged the meniscus membrane in his knee.
15.And after Peter Calapdi took over the role of the Doctor on Doctor Who, he got the exact same knee injury as Matt Smith while performing stunts.
Speaking at the Doctor Who Festival in 2015, Peter said, "When I first met Matt, he was on crutches, and I asked, 'What happened to you?' And he said, 'This show, mate.' And it turns out we have exactly the same thing! I think it's something that happens when you run down corridors and suddenly pivot at the end."
He couldn't get surgery until the season was done shooting, so he used a cane.
He said, "I’ve become rather drawn to the cane that I had. Obviously, I wanted one with a silver fox or a skull on the handle. You go between feeling rather elegant and feeling like a blatant idiot (when using it)."
16.While filming Game of Thrones Season 7, Episode 6, Rory McCann damaged his knees. He told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I had this guy on my shoulder for days and days – it didn't work with a dummy, so I had to carry a real guy, and we had to run and run."
"No wonder I'm fucked," he said.
17.And finally, during 11 seasons of The Walking Dead, Norman Reedus was hurt numerous times, including whiplash, multiple black eyes, a forehead injury requiring stitches, injuries to his knee and shoulder, and a concussion that temporarily shut down production.
He told Men's Journal that he was "popping Advil like they were Tic Tacs" for a bit.
He also said that, if he could change one thing about his time on the show, he'd do his own stunts less often.
