The superhero movie that almost scalped a stuntman
Even though the overwhelming majority of comic book adaptations rely on visual effects to bring their superpowered action sequences to life, a stunt performer on a Marvel Studios production ended up suffering a nasty injury that could have turned out a whole lot worse.
2012’s The Avengers marked the franchise’s first major crossover event after four years and five movies of patient build-up, with audience expectations through the roof. That hype was repaid when the film cleared $1.5billion at the box office to become the highest-grossing film in history at the time that James Cameron didn’t direct, but production didn’t go off without a hitch.
Although great swathes of The Avengers were shot within the confines of soundstages slathered in greenscreen with actors and stunt performers alike kitted out in motion capture leotards that would see the gaps filled in much later on in the process by the effects team, Jeremy Fitzgerald didn’t escape unscathed.
A Marvel Studios regular who’d previously worked on Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger, Fitzgerald was doubling for Jeremy Renner’s arrow-slinging Hawkeye when he suffered a horrific fall that almost ripped his scalp clean off. His job was simple relative to the profession, “get hit with an arrow and fall 30 feet off a building,” but his foot became caught on the way down, and his head scraped against the exterior of a building on the way down.
As he told TMZ, what was left behind was “a freshly peeled slab of scalp,” although it could have been even worse after Fitzgerald “narrowly missed a razor-sharp rain gutter during the accident.” Despite almost being forcibly separated from the crown of his head, though, the stuntman didn’t even take the rest of the day off.
The studio acknowledged the incident by saying that “he slid briefly along the side of a building.” Still, images were making the rounds showing Fitzgerald missing a significant chunk of his scalp, so it wasn’t exactly blown out of proportion to say he was inches away from a life-altering disaster.
Of course, accidents always have the potential to happen on any major blockbuster that requires explosions, falling debris, and various members of the cast and crew being strapped into wire rigs and thrown around with reckless abandon, with Fitzgerald’s near-miss happening just weeks into the mammoth four-month shoot. Fortunately, his was the only notable injury to occur on the set of The Avengers, or at the very least, the only one to become public knowledge.
It’s easy to dismiss superhero cinema as being a product of the visual effects wizards rather than the flesh-and-blood people playing the characters on-screen, but Fitzgerald is nearly scalped proof that practical action – regardless of how minimal it is in the finished feature – remains dangerous work.
