Jake Gyllenhaal Reveals He Got a Staph Infection While Filming ‘Road House’
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On the latest episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, Road House stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Conor McGregor reflected on their remake of the action classic—which apparently involved a lot of injuries and infections on Gyllenhaal’s part.
“We’re fighting on the floor, fighting around tables, we’re fighting around glass,” Gyllenhaal said of their work on the movie. In one particular scene, he said, “I put my hand on the bar,” pressing right into “fucking straight glass.”
“I felt the glass going in my hand,” he recalled. “I remember the feeling [and] went, ‘That’s a lot of glass.’”
He had to deal with “stuff like that all the time,” he added, including “staph from grappling and all that. You get those types of injuries.”
Elaborating on his staph infection—an infection caused by bacteria that typically spreads through cuts and scrapes—the actor said he initially wasn’t sure what caused it.
“I thought it came from, remember that scene where you come with a piece of wood?” he asked McGregor. “I grabbed your arm and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’m injured.’ But my whole arm swelled up. It ended up being staph.”
Jake Gyllenhaal’s ‘Road House’ Remake Punches Way Above Its Weight
“Gratefully, I was really, really trying to take care of everything that we did and my body while we were doing it. I didn’t sustain any major injuries,” he added, which he said was “a testament to the team I was working with.”
Elsewhere in their Armchair Expert interview, Gyllenhaal talked about his mixed feelings when McGregor signed on for Road House.
“I knew they were chasing him for a long time. And there was a part of me that was like, ‘Oh my God, that’d be amazing,’” he said, before then realizing he’d have to actually face the real-life fighter. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want that to happen.’”
The group joked that doing the movie with McGregor was like starring in a snowboarding movie where Shaun White acts as your opponent. “You want them to face-replace you with Shaun White,” Gyllenhaal said.
Ultimately, though, the two enjoyed working together, with McGregor saying their pairing was like a “yin and yang. It fucking works.”
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