“I got a little cocky”: When Steven Seagal broke Sean Connery’s wrist
Years before he gained traction in the industry as a ponytailed practitioner of martial arts in a string of B-tier action movies, Steven Seagal scored one of his first jobs in Hollywood on the most hotly-contested James Bond movie ever made.
Even though he went uncredited, Sean Connery established that Seagal was very much involved in the fight choreography for 1983’s Never Say Never Again, which proved mighty detrimental to the iconic star’s health after he greatly overestimated his own familiarity with hand-to-hand combat techniques.
Connery may have held a black belt in the Kyokushin discipline of karate, but he was a young man then. When he agreed to return as 007 in the unofficial story that only existed due to a long-running legal battle dating back to the 1960s, he was well into his 50s and hardly a spring chicken. Sure, he could still play a tough guy on-screen, but he got more than he bargained for when he tested Seagal.
By that point, the aspiring actor had already been training relentlessly for decades, and while it should be taken with a pinch of salt that he secretly trained CIA agents, as he would regularly go on to claim, it can’t be denied that by the time Never Say Never Again began production, Seagal was an aikido black belt who owned and operated a dojo in Los Angeles.
It had been a dozen years since Connery last threw on the tux in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, and while he wasn’t exactly out of shape at the time, he needed to get fighting fit to convince both himself and audiences that he had enough gas left in the tank to convince as the suave secret agent. Not only because he was three years younger than current official incumbent Roger Moore, but because Never Say Never Again was heading to cinemas mere months after Eon Productions’ Octopussy.
Not that a superstar of his calibre had anything to prove, but that didn’t prevent him from getting a touch too big for his boots nonetheless. Admitting to Jay Leno that “there was a possibility I was going to do aikido and what have you,” Connery made the mistake of thinking his own experience in martial arts matched up to Seagal’s.
The original 007 praised his opposite number for being “really very, very good,” whereas Connery “got a little cocky because I thought I knew what I was doing.” During their sparring session, by his own admission, the actor “got a bit flash” trying to square up to Seagal, who promptly broke his wrist.
Despite being in serious pain, Connery had a reputation to maintain and soldiered on through the physically demanding shoot of Never Say Never Again, with Seagal fortunate the A-lister didn’t decide to try and sink his industry aspirations there and then for making a fool out of him.
