27 Wild Stunts That Left Actors Nearly Drowned, Hanged, Mauled, Decapitated, Or Beaten To Death

1.Tom Cruise was almost decapitated on the set of The Last Samurai by costar Hiroyuki Sanada. Both actors were on mechanical horses, and Sanada's horse struck Cruise as Sanada held out his sword — which almost cost Cruise his head.

"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! It was the biggest moment, the most dangerous moment," Sanada revealed.

2.In fact, Tom Cruise has cheated death a number of times on the set of his films. For example, while filming Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise almost died in a stunt where his character rides a motorcycle off a cliff, jumps off the motorcycle, then activates a parachute. "You can see when I opened it, I was in the wrong position and I opened the parachute, and the parachute turned into the side of the mountain,” Cruise said, revealing he was "very close" to hitting the mountain.

3.Cruise also almost died while filming Top Gun, with costar Barry Tubb saying, “Cruise came as close to dying as anybody on a set I’ve ever seen." In the scene where Maverick waits for rescue in the ocean, holding Goose's body, Cruise's parachute began to fill with water. “They were refilling the camera or something, and luckily one of the frogmen in the chopper saw his chute ballooning out,” Tubb revealed. “He jumped in and cut Cruise loose right before he sank. They would have never found him. He would have been at the bottom of the ocean.”

4.Miles Teller also came close to death while preparing for Top Gun: Maverick. He had to train for five months to be able handle his own camera under intense G-force on set. "I definitely had a moment where I thought I was going to die," Teller revealed. "There was a sequence where we were heading straight towards the ground and you do what’s called a max G pull-up. You’re heading down and at the last second you yank up, and it’s really tough for the pilot. It’s something they train in all the time, but it was the first time we’d done a manoeuvre like that and I completely stopped acting. I looked at the ground, and thought this wasn’t going to end well for me."

5.Dylan O'Brien was so seriously injured on the set of The Maze Runner: The Death Cure that filming had to halt. Only a few days into filming, he was pulled from one vehicle (some sources say it was a motorcycle that fell into a slide) and then hit by another (and O'Brien has set a clear boundary that he's not willing to share details). The accident resulted in a concussion, brain trauma, and a facial fracture, which he had to undergo surgery for. "I really was in a dark place there for a while and it wasn’t an easy journey back,” he said, revealing he considered giving up acting entirely. Months later, he was able to return and finish the film.

6.Mel Gibson almost died while filming Braveheart. He was filming a battle sequence when he was almost crushed by his horse: "He had a good trick where he did this whole rear-up thing, but he'd also fall backwards, which is a problem if you've fallen off first and you're behind him," Gibson said of his horse. "My stunt double ran in and pulled me out of the way just as the horse fell."

7.Like Tom Cruise earlier on this list, action star Jackie Chan has also performed a number of dangerous stunts that went wrong. For example, in Armour of God, he fractured his skull (sending a piece into his brain) while doing a stunt where he leaped from an overhang onto a tree. On the second take, the tree's branches broke, sending Chan hurtling down.

"I try to grab every tree—they just keep breaking. Breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking. Then, boom, I just hit on the rock. I get up, I thought, 'It's nothing.' I just feel my back's hurt. Then I get up, but everybody pushes me down because my whole body was numb. By the time the numb passed, then I feel my air and I see the blood," Chan revealed. Crew members carried Chan down the mountain and to a hospital, where he received surgery.

Golden Harvest/Media Asia/Roadshow Films/Miramax Films

8.A bunch of the actors involved in Roar (which featured "132 big cats, one elephant, three aoudad sheep, and a collection of ostriches, flamingos, marabou, storks, and black swans," according to star Tippi Hedren) were injured by the animals. Writer/director/producer/Tippi's then-husband Noel Marshall literally had to star because no other male star wanted to work with that many dangerous animals. The other stars were Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith, and two of Marshall's sons.

Griffith was mauled so badly that she needed plastic surgery. Hedren herself got gangrene and needed skin grafts. Marshall contracted blood poisoning. Cinematographer Jan de Bont literally had his scalp torn off (he survived). However, no animals were reportedly harmed.

9.Jodie Foster was similarly mauled by a lion when she was only eight years old while filming Napoleon and Samantha. "I was walking ahead of him. He was on an invisible leash, some piano wire. He got sick of me being slow, picked me up and held me sideways and shook me like a doll," Foster revealed on The Tonight Show. I was in shock and thought it was an earthquake. I turned around and saw the entire crew running off in the other direction. The trainer then said, 'Drop it' and he opened his mouth and dropped me."

10.The same lion — Zamba, who was well known in Hollywood and appeared in a large number of TV shows and films — had almost killed Bob Denver on the set of Gilligan's Island. Series creator Sherwood Schwartz revealed that Denver came "within inches" of "being crushed beneath a 400-pound lion."

Denver was filming a scene where he sneaks out of the room the lion is in. Zamba was meant to remain on the bed, and had done so in rehearsals, but when they started to film, Zamba leaped for Denver. "The only thing that saved Bob’s life is the fact that the bed wasn’t bolted to the floor. As a result, when the lion made his leap toward Bob, the lion’s back legs pushed the bed backward, removing the force from his jump. Because of this, the lion’s leap fell short of Bob by about two feet," Schwartz wrote in his book Inside Gilligan's Island: From Creation to Syndication. "The trainer moved in instantly, and grabbed the lion. Bob wasn’t even scratched."

11.One more animal attack — Bo Derek, who played Jane in 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man, was almost killed by a lion onscreen. The lion — which had fixated on Derek — unexpectedly darted for her while filming a scene where she first meets Tarzan (played by Miles O'Keeffe). O'Keeffe put himself between the lion and Derek, who tried to crawl to safety into the water where the lion would not follow. She got away, but not before the lion sliced her shoulder with his paw.

United Artists/Cinema International Corporation

The footage stayed in the final cut — in fact, the scene was adjusted so that the attack could be included.

12.Terry O'Quinn almost killed Matthew Fox on the set of the Lost finale. It was a fight scene between Locke (well, the Smoke Monster using his body) and Jack, and the fight involved knives. Many of the shots used the real knife because rubber blades tend to wobble — but O'Quinn was meant to discreetly switch out the real knife for the rubber one before actually using it on Fox. However, O'Quinn and Fox got a little too into the scene, and when O'Quinn was meant to drop the real knife and pick up the fake out, he actually dropped the real knife and then picked it up again...then stabbed Fox with it.

"I plunged it into Matthew's side," O'Quinn said. "Well, Matthew had a pad [under his shirt] that was probably about the size of your extended palm, where I'm supposed to stab him. It was just to protect him from where I was supposed to stab him. I don't think I held my hand out to wait for the exchange because we were caught up in the action. So I stabbed him with a real knife." Luckily, the pad did its job and Fox was unharmed — but if he had missed the tiny pad, it would've been a very different story.

13.Another actor almost killed by a costar was Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV. Stallone told his costar, Dolph Lundgren, to try to knock him out in the Rocky and Drago fight so that it looked more realistic. "At one point, he hit me so hard on the top of the head I felt my spine compress," Stallone later revealed. "He then hit me with an almighty uppercut. That night my chest and heart started to swell, and I had to be helicopter-ambulanced from my hotel to a nearby emergency room. I was told that Dolph had punched my rib cage into my chest, compressing my heart. If it had swollen any more, I would have died." Stallone was in the ICU for nine days.

14.Like Cruise and Chan, Stallone is known for having almost died on set numerous times. In The Expendables, he said, "My fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I'm not joking. I haven't told anyone this, but I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck."

15.Jason Statham almost died in a freak accident while filming The Expendables 3. He was test-driving a truck when the brakes failed and it flew off a cliff, flying 60 feet into the sea...where it was impaled. Statham was forced to leap from the car (the doors had been removed) and landed in the water, where he would have drowned if he had not been a strong swimmer and diver. "It's the closest I've ever been to drowning," the actor admitted.

16.Burt Reynolds volunteered to do the stunt where his character Lewis goes over a waterfall in a canoe in Deliverance (it was originally meant to be done with a dummy), and quickly regretted it. "[T]hey let the water go and I heard this sound—I dream sometimes of the water coming—I looked around and there was a tidal wave coming at me. I went over the falls and the first thing that happened I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone, and to this day it hurts," Reynolds revealed.

Even after Reynolds made it to the bottom pool, he ran into trouble. "I went down to the water below and it was a whirlpool. I couldn’t get out and the guy there said if you get caught, just go to the bottom. You can get out but you can't swim against it. So I went down to the bottom," Reynolds continued. "What he didn’t tell me was it was going to shoot me up like a torpedo. So I went out."

17.Ed Harris almost drowned on the set of the James Cameron film The Abyss — he shot a bunch of the scenes underwater, and in one scene, one of his safety divers got caught in a cable. So, when Harris signaled for oxygen, no one came — another crew member came to the rescue, but incorrectly inserted the regulator, so that Harris was breathing a mixture of air and water. “For a split second, I really thought I was a goner,” Harris said. He was saved by the underwater director of photography, but was still traumatized by the experience: He cried on the way home. "There was a part of me that was really disappointed in myself for not being able to do this thing. And there was also a part of me that just didn’t know what to do. … I really thought I was going to die for a second."

18.The Green Inferno actually used footage in the film of star Lorenza Izzo almost drowning. It's the scene where her character Justine tries to escape a canoe of cannibals and jumps into the water — Izzo grabbed a rock and fought against the current as she screamed. Director Eli Roth said they had a safe word, but "it was so loud that when she was screaming it at the top of her lungs, none of us heard her." They thought she was acting until they realized she was shouting in English and Spanish.

19.One more drowning example — Isla Fisher almost drowned for real while filming the water tank scene in Now You See Me. Her release chain got stuck in her costume, meaning she was stuck for the three-minute sequence. "I was actually drowning," she told Chelsea Handler on Chelsea Lately. "Everyone thought I was acting fabulously. ... no one realized I was actually struggling."

Lionsgate

20.Kevin Costner almost died in Waterworld in a scene where his character is tied to a boat's mast. He was up there for two hours and was afraid the helicopter — which was shooting the scene 20 feet away — would run into him. He yelled at the pilot to move farther away, but they couldn't hear him over the helicopter's noise. After the helicopter moved away, a sudden storm came and knocked Coster back and forth in the heavy winds. It was too dangerous to lower him, so Costner spent thirty minutes essentially slamming into the boat five feet in either direction.

21.His costars Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tina Majorino — who was nine years old at the time — also had to be rescued by 12 divers after they were thrown off a boat then run over by it, almost drowning.

22.In the scene where Michael J. Fox's character gets hanged (before Doc saves him) in Back to the Future Part III, Fox actually got hanged. A stunt double was used for the wide shots, but Fox himself did the close-ups. He was initially standing on a box, but the swinging wasn't realistic, so he offered to go without the box and use his hands to keep the rope from suffocating him. On the third take of doing this, Fox "miscalculated the positioning of [his] hand" and quickly passed out. Everyone thought he was just acting and did nothing for a few seconds until director Robert Zemeckis realized the truth.

23.The same thing happened to Brendan Fraser in The Mummy. He was directed to "sell it" more, so on the next take, he stood extra high on his toes — and the rope was pulled higher up. "The next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, and there was gravel in my teeth," Fraser said. Luckily, he was alright.

Universal Pictures

24.The Brady Bunch kids almost died while filming an episode at an amusement park — as they were about to board a rollercoaster, actor Robert Reed (who played the family patriarch) pointed out that the camera on the car looked unstable. They decided to do a test run and found that the camera would've likely killed the family had they been on the coaster.

25.In the Poltergeist scene where the clown strangles Robbie, actor Oliver Robins was actually being strangled for real. Robins explained to Fright how the extended arm of the clown got caught around his neck: "I was in a tight, confined space under the bed, and...it's almost like a car accident. You know how a car accident happens so fast, you don't remember, but if you don't act, something is going to happen? Well, Steven saw that, probably in the video assist, and he pulled me away from it. Who knows what might have happened otherwise."

MGM/UA Entertainment Co.

26.Finally, let's end on two examples from the famously troubled The Wizard of Oz. First, Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered second- and third-degree burns during the scene where she leaves Munchkinland in a burst of flame. The trapdoor malfunctioned, causing her to be caught in the fire.

The green paint used as her makeup was also toxic. She could only drink through a straw when it was on (and couldn't eat at all), because it was too dangerous to risk her ingesting it. This was especially concerning when she was burned and the toxic makeup had to be quickly removed from her wounds. “They were literally clawing at her face because it would have scarred her for life,” Hamilton's daughter described, remembering that she was bandaged "like a mummy" while recovering. The studio also apparently called the next day, asking when she'd be back at work.

27.And Buddy Ebsen, who originally was set to play the Tin Man, almost died due to his on-set makeup. "They dusted his face and hands with aluminum powder…real aluminum dust," his daughter Kiki Ebsen revealed. "It was in the air. And because the lights were hot, his makeup melted several times a day. So he had to be reapplied with aluminum dust. And he inhaled it over time. It coated the inside of his lungs like paint. He could not get oxygen to his blood, but he didn’t know this was happening. He just knew that he was cramping up [on] set and during shooting."

Scared to lose the role, Ebsen said nothing — but 10 days later, he woke up unable to breathe and was hospitalized. He had to use an oxygen tank for two weeks, and it took another six weeks for him to recover. "He actually couldn’t get oxygen to the blood, and his blood fermented. The doctor described it as … a breakdown of the nervous system," Kiki said. He was then told to get "the hell back to work" — and when he couldn't, he was replaced with Jack Haley.

What terrifying on-set debacles have you heard about? Let us know in the comments!