Gerard Butler Suffered Acid Burns to His Face While Filming 'Plane'
As the star of action movies like 300 and Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler is used to doing some strenuous workouts and stunt work, but his most recent project involved a particularly gnarly injury. In the thriller Plane, Butler plays a pilot who crash-lands on an island and must try to repair the aircraft while also protecting his passengers from violent separatists—but the most dangerous scene to film was Butler vs. the plane itself.
"No matter what I'm doing, I manage to hurt myself," he said in a recent interview with Seth Meyers. "It was on the scene where... I'm trying to find something that's wrong with the plane before we can take off with this final sequence, and it's something in the wheel, so it's a brake. Now I'm sticking my hand between these two wheels and I'm pretending that I know what I'm doing, and it's so sharp, whatever's in there, every time I bring my hands up they're covered in blood and green fluid, and I'm like 'I don't know what this green fluid is.'"
"We're also shooting in Puerto Rico, so I'm covered in sweat, and the adrenaline, and the nose is running and everything," he continued. "And I guess especially with Covid, you realize why this thing spreads, right, because 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, it's burning my face. And I mean burning. And it turns out this is essentially phosphoric acid."
"The airline pilots that were there watching go 'No!' They're trying to put water on my face. 'Don't put water! It will make it worse!' And I'm just like, burning alive," he added. "So it was intense. And it actually burned for hours, but it was great for the sequence... Anything for the work."
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