While working on her Oscar-winning biopic Judy, Renée Zellweger had an awkward mishap while filming a kissing scene.
When she and her co-star Finn Wittrock locked lips, Zellweger’s prosthetic nose broke and oozed glue, which went onto Wittrock’s face.
“I did not know until this kissing scene and I look at him with horror and I realise, ‘Am I more upset that I got that on his face – and we haven’t cut so I can’t be touching his face in a way to try and get it off – or that it’s attached to my head and there’s so much more where that came from?’” said Zellweger.
“The glue and the thing and the chemicals or something, I don’t know, and some of it would just sneak out the crevice [on the side].”
Zellweger is not alone in experiencing mishaps on film and TV sets. Sometimes they are hilarious – and other times, they are just plain embarrassing, or even dangerous.
The incidents can range from falling asleep during a sex scene, to knocking out a co-star.
It’s no surprise that sex scenes are a breeding ground for mishaps, such as when actors are forced to film uncomfortable scenes while wearing a modesty patch or sock to hide their body parts. Even in a time where intimacy coorindators are a regular presence on set, things don’t always go exactly to plan.
Here are some of the biggest on-set mishaps in film and TV:
The actor says that acting in the scene where she has sex with Leonardo DiCaprio on a bed of money was really painful in The Wolf of Wall Street. “I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money! It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” she said. “If anyone is ever planning on having sex on top of a pile of cash: don’t. Or maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe and everyone gasped. I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand red scratches.”
During the filming of the sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, cast members were terrified when real hammerhead sharks started circling them in the sea. The trouble was that their screams went unheard. The crew didn’t think they were in real danger to start with because it was written into the script that they yelled for help at that point.
The fourth in the Rocky film franchise to focus on the boxing career of the fictional Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, has some gripping and authentic-looking fight scenes. It’s no wonder then that during filming, Stallone actually asked Dolph Lundgren, who plays his opponent, Ivan Drago, to try to knock him out for real. But Lundgren hit him with such force that he was sent to the hospital and was in intensive care for over a week.
Brando was infamous for his bad on-set behaviour. That is one reason why Paramount was nervous about getting him involved in Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia film. It didn’t start well, when on the first day of shooting, the actor who played the patriarch in the family, Vito Corleone, missed his overnight flight from LA to New York. His scene was rescheduled for the next day, but it cost producers $40,000.
In his autobiography, rapper Gucci Mane said he was so tired on set of Harmony Korine’s crime film Spring Breakers, that he fell asleep during his big sex scene. The rapper, who plays Big Arch, a rival drug dealer of James Franco’s Alien character in the film, is seen having sex with one woman, while another sucks his toes. “I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was knocked out, snoring . . . Harmony kept having to wake me up for takes.” In another interview, he explained why he was so exhausted. “I had a concert down there in St Petersburg, Florida, one of the days I had to shoot a scene. Same night. We started shooting at 10 o’clock in the evening until 1 or 2 o’clock.”
The action star broke his ankle while doing his own stunt on set of the sixth Mission Impossible. The scene sees Cruise completing a fast rooftop jump from one building to another, when his foot slams into the side of the wall. But instead of collapsing in a heap, he keeps going as if nothing has happened, until the end of the scene when he can be seen hobbling away. He said: “I knew instantly my ankle was broken and I really didn’t want to do it again so just got up and carried on with the take. I said, ‘It’s broken. That’s a wrap. Take me to hospital’ and then everyone got on the phone and made their vacation arrangement.”
Caplan was nervous when she had to take her clothes off in front of co-star Sheen in the TV series Masters of Sex. It made her feel better that they were both shaky. But then disaster struck. “And we complete the scene, I place the hand on my breast and they yell “Cut” and he immediately walks over to a garbage can and throws up.“ Turns out Sheen had eaten something that upset his stomach, but Caplan didn’t know that. She said: ”My whole self-confidence plummeted to the ground and I realised that I’m a monster and anybody who touches me will immediately start vomiting and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
Nina Dobrev accidentally broke Paul Wesley’s finger while shooting a sex scene in The Vampire Diaries. Dobrev, who plays Elena Gilbert, falls in love with the good-natured vampire Stefan Salvatore (Wesley) in the supernatural teen drama TV series. But they certainly weren’t expecting any injuries at work that day. In an interview, Wesley said: “Being the not-suave guy that I am, my thumb got bent back in a romantic scene where I slowly lowered Nina onto a bed. I was out of commission for a week.”
Obviously this could be a load of hype to promote the first erotic film in the franchise, but there were certainly a lot of terrible sex scenes in which things could go wrong. Johnson, who plays Anastasia Steele, becomes romantically linked to Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and they act out their BDSM desires. Johnson, who wore a modesty thong glued to her body while Dornan wore a “wee bag” to protect his modesty, said: “I got whiplash once from him throwing me on the bed. So f***ing painful. I wish we had a gag reel from the shoot.”
Michael Imperioli is best known for his role as Tony Soprano’s protégé, Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos. During the filming of his death scene in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Imperioli cut his hand on a glass and was taken to hospital, where the doctors sped in to treat his fake bullet wounds.
During the filming of Groundhog Day, Murray was more irritable than usual as he was going through a divorce and was prone to disappearing from set. He had been asked to get an assistant to ease communication between him, the director Harold Raims and the studio. He was against the idea, so he hired somebody who was deaf and spoke only in sign language, which nobody on set, including Murray, could understand. Ramis said: “Bill said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to learn sign language.’ And I think it was so inconvenient that in a couple of weeks, he gave that up. That’s anti-communication, you know? Let’s not talk.”
Marlon Brando in The Godfather
