The iconic scene Alan Rickman filmed standing on one leg: “Nobody knows!”
In the annals of Hollywood history, very few screen debuts are more instantly iconic than Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Before the English thespian donned a suit, picked up a gun, and affected a German accent as Hans Gruber in that action masterpiece, he’d never even stepped in front of a film camera. Then, when he injured his knee on his first shot, he started to panic that his movie career would be over before it even began. Thankfully, he managed to shoot one of the film’s most famous scenes simply by standing on one leg – with audiences all over the world none-the-wiser.
A graduate of London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rickman’s CV was undoubtedly impressive when John McTiernan cast him in Die Hard. He had been plying his trade on the stage for over a decade, so his acting chops could never be questioned – but that lack of screen experience may have given studio executives pause. In truth, it made Rickman himself slightly nervous.
Rickman told Empire in 2015, “I never expected to have any kind of film career, to be honest. It was all a bit of a surprise.” Indeed, the jump from treading the boards in England to shooting it out with Bruce Willis in America was huge. He confessed, “I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood with explosions, and I was holding a gun.”
The star chuckled, “At the time, I kind of thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?'”
Instead of letting his nerves and uncertainty get the best of him, Rickman embraced his new surroundings. He was excited at the prospect of making a big Hollywood film and figured he simply needed to give it his best shot. Hilariously, though, his inexperience with cinema led McTiernan to quip, “I’ve learned with you I’ve gotta be ready for the first take.” You see, Rickman had been used to theatre, where an actor only gets one shot at a scene because they’re performing it live. Therefore, he would put everything he had into take one, not realising that sometimes he’d need to shoot the same take five or six times for various reasons, such as changing camera and lighting setups.
However, the first truly substantial setback in Rickman’s prospective Hollywood career came when he shot his first scene. He performed a simple physical act – jumping down from a small ledge – but somehow managed to jar his knee. The Harry Potter star revealed, “I knew enough to go downstairs and see the doctor. I said, ‘I think I heard something crack in my knee.'” The on-set doc ran some tests and told him, “You may have torn a ligament. If you have, you’re out of action for six months.”
Thinking quickly, Rickman asked the doctor if he could simply pull his trouser leg down over the splint he’d installed to help protect the actor’s injured lower limb. That way, no one on set would know he was hurt, and he could continue the day. The doc begrudgingly agreed but warned him, “Don’t put any weight on that leg.”
Amazingly, the famous scene that was subsequently shot was the one in which Gruber pretends to be one of his American hostages to throw Willis’ John McClane off his scent. Rickman laughed, “I’m playing that scene standing on one leg! Nobody knows, but that’s what I’m doing!”
The next day, Rickman’s swollen knee was drained of excess fluid, and the medical team saw that he had only damaged cartilage, not a ligament. This meant the injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and he would quickly recover.
It’s fascinating to think of how different Hollywood history would have been if Rickman’s knee had been in worse shape. As he mused, “There’s a shape you’re going to have to your career, and then there’s what really happens. I thought I was out of a job.”
