Russell Crowe fractured both legs on set of 'Robin Hood' but 'never took a day off'

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Are you not entertained? Russell Crowe has revealed he once finished shooting a movie "with two broken legs."

In an interview with People magazine, the "Gladiator" star, 59, said he fractured both of his legs on the set of the 2010 movie "Robin Hood" but didn't realize it until years later.

According to Crowe, the incident occurred during a scene where he had to jump "off a castle portcullis onto rock-hard uneven ground" with no pad below him.

Russell Crowe attends the photocall for "Poker Face" during the 17th Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco Della Musica in Rome, Italy.
Russell Crowe attends the photocall for "Poker Face" during the 17th Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco Della Musica in Rome, Italy.

"As I jumped, I remember thinking, 'This is going to hurt,'" Crowe recalled. "It was like an electric shock bursting up through my body. We were shooting a big movie, so you just struggle through, but the last month of that job was very tricky. There was a number of weeks where even walking was a challenge."

Crowe explained he never spoke with the production about his injury and "never took a day off because of it, I just kept going to work." But 10 years later, he started experiencing pain in his legs and visited a doctor, who saw remnants of fractures in Crowe's shin bones and said they would have been from about a decade earlier.

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"Apparently I finished that movie with two broken legs," Crowe said. "All for art. No cast, no splints, no painkillers, just kept going to work and over time they healed themselves."

This was far from Crowe's first injury sustained on set, though. In a 2016 interview with Vulture, the actor said he has a disintegrating hip due to a fall while filming 2000's "Gladiator. During pre-production of another film, he said he had to lift someone up who "stepped on my arms both at the same time and pulled and just tore the labrum tissue." Additionally, Crowe was injured during pre-production on the 2005 boxing movie "Cinderella Man."

"I was in the middle of an actual boxing fight and this Canadian former-Olympic-level boxer took my elbow out which subluxated my shoulder, which exacerbated a problem that was already there," Crowe told Vulture.

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The actor also told Vulture he has tears in his Achilles tendons and no cartilage in his toes. "Well, the cartilage (missing) in the toes is really all about the lateral movement you do in fight sequences," he explained.

In a 2017 interview with the "Chrissie, Sam & Browny" radio show, Crowe also said "one of the stupidest things I ever did" was perform a stunt for the 2000 film "Proof of Life" where he had to run and jump onto a helicopter. He recalled getting "like 20 cuts across my face," adding that the "only thing that stopped me from dying was having a grip on the strap."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Russell Crowe reveals he fractured both legs on set of 'Robin Hood'