Blood, sweat, and tears: 10 troublesome movies where fistfights broke out behind the scenes
Filmmaking is a passionate profession, and having so many people trying to do their best work at the same time can often lead to friction, tension, and the occasional altercation on a film set.
There are so many moving parts required to make any movie – not just the good ones – that anything less than 100% simply isn’t enough, with many actors finding themselves pushed to the physical and mental brink by exacting performances, immersive characters studies, and on occasion, belligerent co-stars.
Two people don’t necessarily have to like each other to work in the same place, and as a result, there’s been no shortage of behind-the-scenes scraps that pitted two thespians against one another in scraps that are less handbags at dawn and more UFC.
In some cases, they’ve remained friends, buried the hatchet, and even created magic, but the recurring theme is that every single one of the following ten titles descended into violence either on or off-camera when they weren’t supposed to.
10 movies where the cast traded real-life blows:
10. Executive Decision (Stuart Baird, 1996)
A fairly one-sided brawl it may have been, but it did at least instil John Leguizamo with the deep-seated hatred of Steven Seagal he’s carried ever since, with the actor basing his washed-up star in The Menu on his nemesis “because I hate him”.
That’s fair enough, with Leguizamo being left blindsided by his Executive Decision co-star’s response to having his authority challenged on set. Seagal told the gathered cast and crew that “I’m in command, what I say is law,” which naturally caused guffaws from his bemused opposite number.
Seagal did not take kindly to such insubordination, though, and as Leguizamo told The AV Club, “I started laughing, and he slammed me with an aikido elbow against a brick wall and knocked the air out of me.” The bad blood was born, to the point Leguizamo admitted he showed up early on the day of Seagal’s on-screen death scene just so he could watch him die.
9. Road House (Rowdy Herrington, 1989)
The cult classic action flick lives on as a cheesy delight powered largely by Patrick Swayze and his mullet, but the climactic fight scene between the star’s James Dalton and Marshall Teague’s Jimmy Reno got a little out of hand.
The latter recalled that Swayze was pushing for realism to benefit the audience, with the caveat – which sounds ripped right from Anchorman – that there was no touching of the head and face. In the name of realism, then, the two started beating seven shades of shit out of each other for real.
“The next thing I know, everybody was piling on top of him and me,” Teague recalled, with the two performers going so method in their approach to knocking each other senseless that the crew ended up ruining the shot to pull them off each other.
8. Red Planet (Anthony Hoffman, 2000)
Two notorious hotheads working together under the eye of a first-time director always had the potential to go awry, which is exactly what happened when Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore came to blows during their downtime on Anthony Hoffman’s Red Planet.
Kilmer was known to big-league Sizemore and boast about his superior salary, which didn’t prevent the Saving Private Ryan star from having enough disposable income to get an elliptical exercise machine shipped to the set so he could work out when he wasn’t required on-camera.
The one-time Batman was even forced to duck to save his life when Sizemore launched a 50-pound weight directly at his head, and they couldn’t even be professional about their dislike for one another. They were instructed not to hit each other in the face during a fight scene, so Sizemore pounded a haymaker straight into Kilmer’s chest instead to leave him winded.
7. Lawless (John Hillcoat, 2012)
Tom Hardy has played several inordinately muscular characters over the years, whereas Shia LaBeouf has not. So, with that in mind, who would comfortably emerge victorious during a brawl between the two on the set of John Hillcoat’s Lawless.
Apologies to anyone who put their money on Hardy, but it wasn’t him. Or was it? “He knocked me out sparko. Out cold,” the Bronson star semi-sarcastically admitted. “He’s a bad, bad boy. He is. He’s quite intimidating as well, he’s a scary dude.” Never underestimate the smaller dog in the fight, then, with LaBeouf ensuring his beefier co-star was left looking at the lights.
Hillcoat confirmed the fisticuffs “escalated to the point where they had to be restrained,” but LaBeouf contradicted Hardy’s version of events, explaining that even though there had been a real fight between the pair, the fact “he told everybody I knocked him out” wasn’t entirely true.
6. The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)
Movie stars don’t come much more professional than Tom Cruise, but during his younger days, he wasn’t quite as buttoned-down and dialled-in as he was now, something Rob Lowe discovered when the future A-list megastar unleashed his unbridled ferocity.
While rehearsing for a staged fight scene, Lowe unintentionally clocked Cruise a touch too hard, which served as the catalyst for a full-fledged bare-knuckle brawl. “We all beat the living shit out of each other,” was how Lowe remembered it, praising his co-star for holding his own and being “such a competitive lunatic.”
The Outsiders cast was stacked with potential and future household names, including Lowe, Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, and Emilio Estevez, so there was bound to be a pissing contest or two along the way.
5. The Lords of Flatbush (Martin Davidson, 1974)
There was so much hatred between Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere on the set of The Lords of Flatbush that director Martin Davidson was left with no other option but to give one of them their marching orders for the sake of the production going off without a hitch, and it wasn’t Sly.
Instigated by a piece of chicken believe it or not, Gere spilling grease and mustard over Stallone was the final straw that caused a shoving match between the two where several legitimate blows were thrown. That was the final straw for Davidson, who ended up firing the former and replacing him with Perry King.
They didn’t exactly kiss and make up decades down the line when they were both stars, either, with Stallone even sharing the highly specific conspiracy theory stating his belief that Gere might hold him personally responsible for starting and spreading the infamous gerbil rumour.
4. Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978)
Harvey Keitel favoured an immersive, naturalistic approach to acting, whereas Richard Pryor’s background in comedy made him lean much heavier into the improvisational. Put them together in an intense crime drama, and it was a powderkeg waiting to explode.
Director Paul Schrader confirmed as much when he revealed that Keitel had grown so weary of Pryor’s long-winded freestyling that he looked directly into the camera and threw the contents of an ashtray directly into it to deliberately ruin a take.
In retaliation, Pryor and his bodyguard proceeded to pin the Mean Streets alumni to the ground and start wailing on him, so it’s no surprise they often refused to be in the same shot at the same time. Moreover, Pryor is even alleged to have pulled a gun on Keitel in a drug-fuelled rage because he flat-out refused to do more than three takes of the same scene.
3. Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999)
Jamie Foxx and LL Cool J were both successful musicians who’d made an equally successful transition into acting, but the commonality between them mattered little when they ended up attacking each other on Oliver Stone‘s sports drama.
The scene in question only called for a heated shoving match, but Foxx felt that his co-star was treating things a little too seriously, so he responded in kind by unleashing his fists of fury. The feud continued long after, with barbs being traded in rap songs and stand-up shows, but they eventually buried the hatchet.
It sounds like quite the fistfight, with cinematographer Sam Totino describing a “massive fucking punch that hits Jamie in the face.” Obviously, the spurred them into a “full-blown fight” with “punches flying everywhere,” leaving the gathered cast and crew to wonder just how things managed to spill over so badly.
2. Fury (David Ayer, 2014)
David Ayer’s desire for realism saw him put his cast through the wringer to establish a real bond of brotherhood so they could convincingly play a grizzled crew of tank operators in the World War II movie Fury, with the downside being that brothers often fight.
Before shooting even started, the filmmaker was happy to let his ensemble have it out, with Jon Bernthal admitting there were “black eyes and bloody noses” along the way. The actor shared that Ayer even had them “put in a ring and told to fight each other,” all of which came prior to a single frame being captured.
Scott Eastwood and Shia LaBeouf developed a particularly prickly relationship that reached a head when they ended up scrapping, but thanks to its unique preparation process, it was something they were already accustomed to.
1. Maidstone (Norman Mailer, 1970)
Ironically, Norman Mailer deciding to blur the lines between cinema and documentary in Maidstone worked perfectly in his favour when he ended up launching into a full-scale showdown with Rip Torn.
Mailer played a famous director launching a campaign for the office of president, with Torn cast as his brother. The two characters were doing what they were supposed to when a scene between them erupted into violence, but the performers treated it with the utmost realism.
Torn cracked Mailer in the head with a hammer; the latter responded by raining down punches and even went full-blown Mike Tyson by biting his ear. Hitting, snarling, grunting, and choking, Mailer decided it was absolutely perfect and kept it in the final cut of the film.
