The worst injury Jackie Chan ever suffered on set
When it comes to actors that do their own stunts, Jackie Chan is in a class of his own.
Chan’s commitment to his craft is second to none. Throughout his vast filmography, the characters Chan has played have participated in many beautiful and insane action-comedy set-pieces, and what makes these so exhilarating to watch is that Chan is doing pretty much all of it himself.
While many other filmmakers and actors will use stunt doubles and carefully edit the stunt to hide this, Chan doesn’t need to. He simply displays his fight scenes and big set pieces with minimal cutting, allowing audiences to really soak in the full glory of what’s unfolding on-screen.
His astonishing gifts in martial arts and acrobatic action-comedy have made him one of the most successful film stars in the world, with huge followings in the East and the West… but inevitably, given his insistence on doing his own stunts, he’s also injured himself quite a few times.
Filming the 1978 movie Drunken Master left Chan with an eye injury that almost led to him going blind. When he fell from the clock tower in Project A, he injured his neck. When he slid down a pole and through a sheet of glass in Police Story, he broke his back. But the worst one of all – and the time when Chan came closest to dying – happened on the set of the 1986 film Armour of God.
When performing a stunt in which his character jumps from a castle wall onto a tree branch, the take went absolutely fine the first time. However, Chan wasn’t satisfied and asked to do another take. This time, the branch broke, and he fell headfirst onto the rocky ground below.
Chan required emergency eight-hour brain surgery and had to have a plastic plate fitted into his head to cover up the fracture in his skull. The accident left him hard of hearing in one ear, but other than that, it mercifully doesn’t seem to have had any long-lasting health effects. After all, in subsequent years, Chan was back at it, doing bonkers stunts as if nothing had happened.
This is, after all, the man who broke his ankle during a stunt in 1995 and then just did another take while wearing a protective boot. Chan is a performer of the most extraordinary resilience and the fact that he never slowed down even after this near-death experience is a stirring testament to that.
