Gerard Butler accidentally burned his face with acid while filming ‘Plane’
Gerard Butler has explained how he accidentally rubbed phosphoric acid into his eye while filming Plane. The actor stars as pilot Brodie Torrance in Jean-François Richet’s new thriller film and detailed the story during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
The accident occurred during the shooting of a scene in which Butler’s character attempts to fix a brake before takeoff. “No matter what I’m doing, I manage to hurt myself,” Butler shared. “Now I’m sticking my hand in between these two wheels, kind of pretending that I know what I’m doing.”
He added: “Every time I bring my hands out, they’re covered in blood and green fluid, right? And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what this green fluid is.'”
Butler mentioned how the scene was filmed on a hot Puerto Rican day, meaning he was sweating profusely. “I’m rubbing my face and, suddenly, it’s in my throat. It’s in my mouth. It’s up my nose. It’s in my eyes,” Butler said. “It’s burning my face, and I mean burning.”
“It turns out this is essentially phosphoric acid,” he added. “And the airline pilots that were there watching go, ‘No’,” he told Meyers. “I’m just, like, burning alive…so it was intense. It actually burned for hours, but it was great for the sequence.”
Speaking to Polygon, Butler shared details of the film’s “exhausting” stuntwork, revealing that “at one point a cameraman literally fell over the railings” as he was shooting a plane action sequence. “He was strapped in because it was so violent,” the actor said. “I think that gives the audience the sense that they’re really with us in this cockpit.”
“I have done so many takes surrounded by gunfire and then realised at the start of that take I didn’t have my earplugs in, and you have to do a whole take, and it feels like that one alone has taken away 10% of my hearing,” Butler continued. “I had one set piece in London Has Fallen, and an explosion went off, and I had ringing in my ear for two months. The problem is you don’t want to go, ‘Cut! Stop!’ I literally have lost easily 30% of my hearing from this stuff.”
Butler has previously worked with Joe Carnahan on the 2021 action thriller Copshop. The director described the actor as “dynamite in the movie“.
Plane was released last Friday and stars Mike Colter, Yoson An, and Tony Goldwyn. The film follows a pilot as he allies with a prisoner to save passengers from the hostile territory their plane has landed in.
Watch Butler share the story below.
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