Jackie Chan's injuries (28 photos)

Having starred in a colossal (more than a hundred!) number of films, the lion's share of which were made in the action-comedy genre with hurricane fights and chases, Jackie Chan has become a walking icon and the personification of crazy success. Its cult status is largely explained by Jackie's traditional refusal to use stuntmen when filming even the most dangerous scenes. The actor paid a high price for this fame - perhaps it’s easier to list what he did NOT break on the set.

However, fractures seem like a mere trifle when it comes to life and death... In the eighties, Chan’s dedication sometimes bordered on madness.

The list of injuries Jackie Chan received while filming action films is amazing. Even among professional stuntmen you will not find a single poor fellow who has been in a hospital bed so often.

Jackie Chan suffered his most severe injury in 1986, when he found himself on the verge of life and death. Here is how the actor himself talks about this incident:

“It happened while filming a very simple stunt. I was filming Armor of God in Yugoslavia, trying to recover from a 20-hour air flight. All you had to do was jump from the castle wall to the tree below. Everything turned out perfect the first time, but I still felt like it could have been done better. I tried again, and somehow fell off the branch I was supposed to be holding onto. Bang! I fell past the tree straight to the ground. It was about seven or eight meters, generally quite high. There was a cameraman standing under the tree with a movie camera, and if he hadn’t run to the side, I would have fallen right on top of him. I was unlucky that he turned out to be so agile: if I had fallen on his head, we certainly would not have suffered much, this has happened to me many times. But he ran away, and I hit my head as hard as I could. The soil was rocky. One of the stones pierced my head so that fragments of my skull cut into my brain, and blood began to ooze from my eyes and ears.”

“I didn’t lose consciousness, and I remember everything well. The film crew rushed to their phones to quickly find a hospital where they perform brain surgery. Eight hours later I went under the knife. Operation was successfully completed. I recovered quickly, but now I have a hole in the side of my skull, which is plugged with a plastic plug to prevent my brains from falling out. I am partially deaf in my left ear, but otherwise everything is fine. Later they told me that I had intracranial bleeding, and if I had not been operated on in the first day, I would have died. But I took it calmly - after all, I didn’t die!”

The episode with the tree was never included in the film.

Chan's head was damaged many times; in particular, he suffered several dozen concussions received under various circumstances. The actor suffered a particularly severe blow on the set of the early film “The Hand of Death” (1976) at the very beginning of his career - in one of the scenes, Chan was knocked out by his partner in a fight scene and spent several hours unconscious. At the time of the knockout, Jackie was replacing one of the actors, since at that time he was, in fact, a stuntman who only got a prominent role by luck.

Young Lee Hwang, with whom Jackie Chan filmed the funny teacher-student fight scene for Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978), was not an acrobat or dancer. He was a real kung fu master, winner of many competitions. Jackie had the misfortune to realize this at the moment when Young knocked out his tooth with a precise kick. Of course, this happened by accident.

In the same film there is a scene in which actor Roy Horan slashed the hand of the long-suffering Chan with a sharp sword (the sword was supposed to be dulled, but was forgotten). The actor fell to the ground, writhing in pain, but the Chinese cameraman calmly continued filming, and director Yuen Woo-Ping (the same one who later choreographed the fights in The Matrix) equally calmly included these shots in the film.

During the filming of Drunken Master (1978), young Jackie Chan was hit in the eye with a stick. The eyebrow was cut in two, and the hospital said that the actor did not lose his sight only by miracle - the damage was so severe.

Jackie Chan's nose was broken on the set of Young Master (1980), but it wasn't half as bad as the damage to his larynx. In the rope choke episode, Jackie's trained opponent overdid the effort, his throat became deformed, and the actor began to choke. Emergency intubation was required.

"Lord Dragon" (1981). Jackie Chan missed a powerful blow to the chin, causing a crack to form in the bone. His face was swollen, and the pain was such that Chan could not even speak for several days. This greatly interfered with filming, since Jackie not only starred here, but also directed (his third film). The actors began to learn to understand sign language, but after a week, Chan spoke again.

Filming was paused again when, a short time later in the same film, Jackie Chan suffered a severe concussion after an unfortunate fall to the ground from a great height in the living pyramid scene.

"Project A" (1983). While filming the famous fall from the tower, Jackie Chan received one of the worst injuries in his career - falling from an eight-meter height with his chest onto a metal beam, he then hit his head on the ground. The result was five broken ribs, a second broken nose and a severe neck injury with torn ligaments and loss of the ability to turn his head for three months.

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That unsuccessful take was the third in a row - the previous two were quite successful, but Jackie himself insisted on a third attempt, trying his best to make the scene as good as possible. In the end, fragments from the first two takes were included in the film, and the suffering of Jackie, who lay in a hospital bed for almost a month, and then was on painkillers for a year due to breathing problems, was in vain.

On the set of The Patron (1985), the actor hit a steel grate with his fist, as a result of which he seriously injured his hand - four fingers were broken. In general, he injures his fingers in almost every film, and likes to tell stories about how he sets his joints between takes.

One of the most monstrous stunts in the history of stuntman craft was performed by Jackie Chan without any stunt doubles in the wonderful action-packed film “Police Story” in 1985. We're talking about the famous pole slide at the mall. Jackie Chan jumped onto a pole and descended it from a height of the fifth floor, tearing hundreds of electric garlands along the way, and at the end fell onto the pavilion, breaking through it. After the fall, Jackie rushed to finish the scene, and everyone around him breathed a sigh of relief, realizing that he was okay. But just a few seconds later, when the camera stopped filming, the actor sank to the floor in exhaustion, unable to take a single step. He will be out of the hospital in two months.

The result of the crazy undertaking was third-degree burns to the hands, a dislocation of the pelvic bone (!), but most importantly, a fracture of the seventh and eighth vertebrae. Yes, Jackie Chan broke his back in this episode, and didn't end up paralyzed solely because he was Jackie Chan. Anyone else would have spent their entire life riding in a wheelchair and being fed through a tube.

Against the backdrop of a damaged spine, the hip fracture that Jackie received at the very end of the filming of “Police Story”, jumping onto a marble floor from a height of the second floor, no longer looks so serious.

“Police Story is still my favorite movie. A real hurricane of crazy stunts and fist fights that will take your breath away. We didn’t think about the danger - when I wrote the script, on the contrary, I tried to invent something suicidal, and was in a state of some kind of euphoria. The more dangerous the better. Definitely my most inspired and reckless film, and I don’t regret anything for a second.”

"Police Story 2" (1988). Jackie, sitting at the bar, had to dodge a massive chair thrown at him. In one of the takes, the chair overtook the actor and cut his head to the bone.

"Miracles" (1989). The story of the “Drunken Master” repeated itself - a blow with a stick and a new cut of the same eyebrow, plus partial loss of vision in the left eye. There was very little time left before the eye itself was damaged, but Jackie was again very lucky and her vision returned.

“Armor of God 2: Operation Condor” (1991) “I fell from a chain onto a rock and dislocated my sternum. Another bone that I didn't know could be dislocated, but somehow I managed to do it. Sometimes I'm amazed at how many unnatural dislocations I've suffered in my acting career."

“I dislocated my cheekbone while filming Police Story 3 (1992). I didn’t even know this was possible!”

This dislocation was not the only one - in a risky scene with a helicopter lying on the roof of a moving train, Jackie did not have time to escape the blow and dislocated his shoulder.

“City Hunter” (1992) An unfortunate fall led to... a new dislocation of the same shoulder that had just healed after an unsuccessful take for “Police Story”! This is definitely one of Jackie's most painful comedies: while filming a chase on a skateboard, he also broke his kneecap while trying to cling to a moving car. This is one of those fractures that causes particularly acute suffering. Jackie Chan injured his kneecaps a total of seven times, but this incident was the most severe.

A big mishap occurred on the set of Crime Story (1993), when Jackie tried to perform a risky stunt by jumping moments before two cars collided... He did not manage to do it in time, and his legs were caught between a truck and a minibus, which caused double fracture. Filming was stopped for three months. What trick did Jackie do immediately after leaving the hospital? That's right, the one with the cars. He didn't even think about giving it up.

Jackie Chan gets burned quite often, but he had a particularly hard time when, in one of the scenes of the second part of Drunken Master (1994), he threw himself straight into the burning coals and spent several agonizing seconds in them. The protection turned out to be insufficient - the skin on the actor’s palms came off almost completely. And not only on them... The episode with roasting alive became unique in its kind, since Chan was the only one who put his hands into real fire for the love of art.

While filming Rumble in the Bronx (1995), Jackie Chan suffered one of those fractures that last a lifetime. The stunt was not that difficult - all Jackie had to do was jump from the pier onto a hovercraft flying by. A height of no more than three meters is nothing for the nimble Jackie. But he did not take into account that the surface of the ship was moving quickly relative to the pier. Unable to group himself properly, the actor suffered a fracture of his right ankle with splintering of the bones and a long-term loss of the ability to move without the help of crutches.

This incident set back the filming process for a long time. To save time, Jackie Chan returned to work with his leg in a cast - a cover painted to resemble a sneaker was pulled over it, and Chan managed to film several scenes in this form!

The fracture was so severe that after it, Jackie Chan can no longer use his right leg when landing during a jump. The episode was never re-shot. The film included a rather creepy shot...

The third time Jackie broke his nose was in the movie Mister Cool (1996) (or rather, he had it broken). As in previous cases, the sparring partner missed, trying to bring his fist as close to Chan’s face as possible for “greatest authenticity.” Well, the authenticity turned out to be absolute, and the moment with the broken nose was included in the final edit, since Chan did not lose his composure from the blinding blow, and... continued to play his role! The stuntman who hit Jackie was shocked by the willpower of his opponent, because he knew very well how powerful the blow was.

The misadventures were not limited to the nose: in the same film, Jackie Chan miscalculated while performing a backflip and once again injured his neck - much the same as in “Project A”.

Beginning in the mid-nineties, Jackie Chan, who had passed 40, came to his senses somewhat, realizing that the deadly tricks he had gotten away with in his youth could this time end in the most disastrous way. In addition, his films became much larger budget. For the last fifteen years, the actor has limited himself to bruises, cuts, minor burns and dislocations - he doesn’t even consider all this to be an injury. But he still performs most of the tricks himself. Even today, when he is already sixty, Chan continues in the same spirit. There's nothing you can do about it - reputation!

And just like in the good old days, at the end of Jackie Chan films you can always see a selection of unsuccessful takes. By the way, the songs against which the credits roll are performed by the tireless Jackie himself. He has already released 20 albums.