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Uma Thurman as “The Bride” in “Kill Bill – Volume 1”
Photo: United Archives / IMAGO
Stories take up social issues, values, conflicts and dynamics and reflect them back into society. They make it possible to put yourself in other people's shoes, to understand other perspectives, but also your own emotions.
Sometimes they are also deeply disturbing, this is especially true for films and series. This danger not only affects viewers, but also actors and actresses themselves. The Englishwoman Hannah Waddingham recently spoke on a talk show about chronic claustrophobia that the filming of a waterboarding scene in the TV spectacle “Game of Thrones” caused her have.
Here are six further examples of filming that have placed psychological or physical strain on the actors, some of them lasting.
Spielberg torments his future wife
At a time when films were largely made without the use of computer technology such as CGI, large numbers of animals were regularly used when large numbers of animals were needed - including snakes, spiders and insects. For the second part of the “Indiana Jones” series (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”) in 1984, director Steven Spielberg ordered, among other things, tens of thousands of beetles and cockroaches.
Actress Kate Capshaw filmed a scene with many of her animal co-stars. According to her own statement, she took an unspecified relaxation agent to “not go crazy” during filming. She revealed this in a making-of for the film series.
Numerous animals were dropped on Capshaw during the scene. So some of her character Willie Scott's panic was probably not fake.
Capshaw not only forgave director Spielberg for this difficult filming, but even married him almost seven years later. Today, Kathleen Sue Spielberg and her husband have three biological and two adopted children.
A serious car accident
According to her own statement, Uma Thurman struggled for almost 15 years to get the footage of her accident during the filming of “Kill Bill – Volume 2”. Director Quentin Tarantino persuaded his muse to drive a car quickly along a forest path. A stunt woman was actually supposed to replace Thurman in the scene, but she had a day off on the day of filming.
Thurman lost control of the car, struck a tree and sustained injuries to his neck and knees. She still suffers from it to this day. "That was one of the things I regret most in my life," Tarantino said in 2018. "I persuaded her to get in the car, reassured her that the road was safe. And it wasn’t her.”
According to Thurman, the film's producers, including Harvey Weinstein, refused to release footage of the accident. "They lied, destroyed evidence, and continue to lie about the lasting damage they caused and then decided to cover it up," Thurman wrote in a 2018 Instagram post.
The accident came to light when the New York Times reported on Thurman's allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein in February 2018. Weinstein harassed her in a hotel room and began exposing himself, Thurman said at the time. Similar allegations against Weinstein by other women triggered the global #MeToo debate about abuse.
Never shower again
Finally alone. A young woman turns on the water in the shower, a smile on her lips. Then a shadow appears at her back, behind the curtain. The figure comes closer, the forehand is ripped away. A knife flashes, lots of panicked screams, accompanied by shrill string music.
It is perhaps the most famous horror film scene in history: Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death in the Bates Motel. A film murder that has left a lasting impression on more than just generations of viewers. Leigh herself stopped showering after filming “Psycho” (1960). Decades later, the actress, who died in 2004, said in interviews that she still didn't shower again.
In the 1990s, she revealed to the US entertainment show Entertainment Tonight that she now sometimes showers, but only when there is no other option. But she always left the bathroom door open and the shower curtain up, and she also stood under the shower with her face towards the door so that she could observe.
Metal rods in the eye
With “Clockwork Orange” in 1972, Stanley Kubrick delivered a disturbing orgy of violence. This dystopia “of almost unimaginable perfection and truly satanic evil,” as SPIEGEL judged at the time, was difficult to bear, and not just for some viewers.
One of the most famous scenes in the film is where the main character Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, is forced to watch brutal film scenes over and over again as part of his rehabilitation program. So that Alex cannot close his eyes, they are kept open using an apparatus. The metal rods used were real and caused McDowell to injure the cornea of his eyeball.
McDowell described filming this scene as "torture" in an interview marking the film's 50th anniversary. However, the result was worth his torment, said McDowell in 2021. In the first few years after the film was released, the Brit saw it differently. "For the first ten years after I did it, I resented it," McDowell said in the interview. »I was tired of it. I didn't want to talk about the damn thing, I was over it. I said to myself, 'Look, I'm an actor, I played a great role, I'm moving on.' Then I realized it was a masterpiece and I had a big part in the film. You might as well just accept it and enjoy it.«
Talking to cartoon characters
For Bob Hoskins, who died in 2014, it was perhaps the role of a lifetime. As private detective Eddie Valiant, who was very fond of alcohol, the Briton helped prevent a genocide of cartoon characters in “The Wrong Game with Roger Rabbit” (1988). For the role, Hoskins got into the habit of talking to imaginary cartoon characters. So he had to learn to hallucinate, as he said in an interview in 1988. He played a lot with his daughter, who had imaginary friends at the time.
After filming, Hoskins said he found it difficult to end conversations. For a long time after filming, he found himself talking to himself and imagining being surrounded by cartoon characters. "I was sitting there, talking normally, and suddenly a weasel crawled out of the wall towards me."
“The Wrong Game with Roger Rabbit” was considered the most complex animated film in history at the time and was a huge success for the then struggling Disney company at the end of the 1980s.
Back to bed with mom
Kyle Richards is probably best known to many people in Germany today because of her “role” in the reality TV series “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”. However, Paris Hilton's aunt had one of her first major appearances in the horror film "Halloween" from 1978. As an eight-year-old, she starred in the horror classic by the then relatively unknown director John Carpenter.
The filming itself wasn't the problem for Richards. She admitted to Halloween Daily News in 2013 that she was too young to really understand what the film was about when it was filmed.
When she saw the finished work in the cinema, the problems began. »I didn't know what to expect. When I first saw the film in its entirety, it was a very different film. It was really scary and I slept with my mother after that until I was 15 years old. “I was terrified,” she said, according to the report.
After this experience, Richards did not want to act in horror films again. »After seeing myself in this film, I always thought that someone was hiding behind the curtains, outside my windows or under my bed.«