From Joey In "Friends" To Pam In "The Office" — 17 Times Something Happened To An Actor That Had To Be Written Into The Script
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From injuries to pregnancies, writers and showrunners have to handle various physical changes of their stars.
While makeup and industry tricks can hide almost anything these days, some writers just go with it and actually write the injury, pregnancy, scars, and more into the actual plot!
So, here are 17 examples of the writers and producers just rolling with it:
1.Mean Girls
Yes, the brace worn by principal Ron Duvall was real and necessary, but not for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome like Tina Fey wrote into the plot. Instead, actor Tim Meadows had broken his wrist before filming had even started.
Initially, Tim thought that his injury would cause him to drop out of the movie altogether, but Tina just said, "We’ll just write a little joke about you having Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." Thankfully Tina's solution worked just fine, and we were able to see Tim's hilarious depiction of Ron!
Here's one of his most iconic scenes:
2.Friends
Matt LeBlanc told the story of how he was injured during the filming of "The One Where No One's Ready,” and that this accident had to be written into some future episodes. When Joey and Chandler are arguing over the chair, Matt trips over the coffee table in his haste to get there and ends up dislocating his shoulder.
Here's the footage of the accident, with the cast reacting to it.
So Joey's sling was very real in "The One with the Jam"
3.Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The writers of Brooklyn Nine-Nine had actually thought up the idea of Amy and Jake trying for a baby before they knew that Melissa was pregnant, as showrunner Dan Goor explained: "We decided, at that point [of their relationship], before the season started and before I knew she was pregnant, to make her and Jake decide to try and have a kid."
They had already hidden Melissa's first pregnancy with the genius idea of having her go undercover as a pregnant woman during the filming of Season 3 (pictured above). But when Season 7 rolled around, with them having already decided to have the couple trying to conceive and with Melissa actually being pregnant, they decided to go with Amy and Jake having a baby!
Here's Amy and Jake's baby journey:
4.The Empire Strikes Back
When Mark Hamill was in a car accident that fractured his nose and cheekbone in 1977, director George Lucas knew that his facial reconstruction would be obvious. They decided to go along with it anyway, with George saying: "My feeling was some time had passed, they've been in the Rebellion fighting, that kind of thing, so the change was justifiable."
However, when Luke got his face mangled by the Wampa at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, fans naturally thought they were addressing Luke's unexplained facial injuries. Lucas, while admitting it helped explain the injuries, said the scene wasn't intended for that reason.
Carrie Fisher added her side to the story, by claiming that Lucas and Irvin Kershner shot a scene after Luke was saved from the Wampa. In that scene, his face gets attended to by a droid, and she said that there were discussions about how far they should go to address Hamill's face.
Here's the Wampa attack:
5.Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Harison Ford got his chin scar from a car accident when he was just 20 years old. He was fumbling with the seatbelt, and the car swerved into a telephone pole. The resulting injuries left him with a chin scar that would go on to fit quite well with his role as Indiana Jones.
In fact, the writers even gave the scar a backstory in The Last Crusade when they showed us a young Indi, played by River Phoenix, picking up a whip while cornered by a lion and slashing his own chin open with it!
Here's the scene where they gave Indi his scar:
6.The Office
One happy circumstance was Pam and Jim's second baby in The Office. Jenna Fischer revealed that "Pam and Jim snuck away last season on Valentine's Day, and they had sex," talking before the Season 8 pregnancy storyline.
She went on to say: "When we started shooting that episode, I thought to myself, 'If everything goes well, this is going to be a very, very convenient coincidence,'" — and she actually found out she was pregnant IRL when they were filming that episode! So Jenna's actual pregnancy was written in alongside Pam giving birth to baby Cece!
7.Friends
When Lisa Kudrow was pregnant during Seasons 4 and 5 of the show, the writers decided to include her pregnancy in the actual script. That's how Phoebe ended up being the surrogate mother of Frank and Alice's triplets!
In an interview, Lisa explained the adorable ritual the cast used to do before shooting while she was pregnant: “The six of us would do a huddle backstage and just say, ‘All right, have a good show, love you love you love you love you.’ And when I was pregnant, then they would say, ‘Have a great show, love you love you — love you, little Julian!’ ‘Cause we knew it was a boy, and that was his name.”
Here's Lisa and Phoebe being pregnant on the show:
8.The Fugitive
Being an action movie star, Harrison Ford is prone to the odd onset (and offset) injury, and one that actually made it into the movie was in The Fugitive. Harrison had damaged the ligaments in his leg while shooting some scenes in the woods.
While a lot of the time shooting would just be paused, Harrison's injury required surgery, which he refused to get until filming was wrapped. This meant that Harrison's limp had to become his character Richard Kimble's limp for the rest of the movie!
You can see his limp in this chase scene:
9.The Vampire Diaries
Another actor who was actually pregnant off-screen and on was Candice King, who played Caroline in The Vampire Diaries. When Candice told the producers that she was pregnant, they decided to go ahead and write it into the show, despite the stumbling block of her character being a vampire.
Exec producer Julie Plec remember warning the CW president about her "bananas pitch" to magically transfer Alaric's babies into her, and he went along with it, thus giving us one of the most surprising moments of the entire series.
Here's the moment she finds out in the show:
10.Romeo + Juliet
Jamie Kennedy was really worried that the black eye he got in an incident at a nightclub before filming would cost him his role as Sampson in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.
The actor explained that Baz was all for incorporating it into the movie, however, saying: "Baz is so brilliant. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I like it. I can use that.’ I thought I was going to lose the movie. Baz is like, ‘You would have a black eye. You guys are brawlers.’ So they worked it in and added the black eye for the whole shoot.”
11.Fuller House
Writers had no options other than to write Stephanie Tanner's injury into Fuller House, because actor Jodie Sweetin's injury was so bad. Jodie said in her own words: "There's no hiding that I can't walk. I can only be a houseplant in so many episodes where I'm just stuck somewhere."
Jodie had broken her leg when she was climbing back over her fence, retrieving a toy that her 6-year-old daughter had thrown over, ouch! The writers wrote in Stephanie's leg break in the aptly named episode, "Break a Leg."
Here's Jodie's Instagram post following her injury:
12.A League of Their Own
The ridiculous bruise that backup catcher Alice Gaspers, played by Renée Coleman, gets when sliding into base is no makeup department mockup, it's one that she actually got. The intensive training the actors had to do, and the physical toll they were under meant that injuries were common, and this one actually made it into the movie! Tracy Reiner said about the severity of the injury: "She had that bruise for, like, 10 years."
13.Babylon 5
The writers behind Babylon 5 had to rethink the scene where Ivanova escapes the Drazi, due to actor Claudia Christian breaking her ankle in an offset incident. Ivanova was initially supposed to deal with the Drazi herself, but after the incident, Claudia couldn't perform the physical demands that were required. The writers, therefore, had Garibaldi rescue her instead, and they decided to write in that during the fight with the Drazi, Ivanova would break her leg.
14.Hawaii Five-0
Scott Caan, who played Daniel Williams in Hawaii Five-0, was forced to return back to the US mainland when he aggravated an old knee injury. The production team and Scott himself were not going to let that get in the way; instead, they decided to write Danno's injury into the script.
That’s why in the episode "Lanakila," Danno is asked about his injuries by Dr. Teddy, and Danno, standing next to Steve, responds, "This guy is like a physical injury, Doc. Ah, 10 minutes after meeting him, I get shot and blasted backwards through a window, okay? A few hours after that, he drives a car — not joking — onto the deck of a Chinese freighter ship. And, yes, I was in it. The car, not the ship."
15.The Sting
Robert Shaw was actually hired to play the mob boss Doyle Lonnegan at the last minute when Richard Boone stopped returning the production team's calls. The team were then forced to accept that the boss would have a limp in the film, after Robert damaged his leg in a racquetball accident before shooting!
16.Sports Night
Sometimes the seriousness of an actor's condition dictates what happens to their onscreen character. This was the case when Robert Guillaume suffered a stroke on his way to work in 1999. Naturally, the serious nature impacted what the writers did with his role as Isaac Jaffe on Sports Night, so they decided for his character to mirror the actor's condition. Thankfully, Robert recovered, and his return to the show was a beautiful moment!
Here's a video of Isaac Jaffe's return:
The stroke he suffered during Sports Night was written into the show. This was his return.RIP Robert Guillaume
17.Here's Lucy
The showrunners actually thought that they would have to end Here's Lucy before its time when the star of the show, Lucille Ball, fractured her leg in a skiing accident. But instead, Lucy also suffered a leg break, and Lucille managed to perform most of the 1972–73 series while wearing a cast!
