Jackie Chan has been performing his own stunts over the course of his five-decade career, and has broken many bones while filming dangerous action sequences. But one of the most dangerous stunts he ever performed was for the 1986 film Armour of God, which almost killed him.
In a conversation with Yahoo Entertainment, Jackie recalled that he had been filming a beer-drinking sequence earlier in the day so by the time he got to shooting the stunt, he was drunk. “In this day, I’d probably be drinking water,” he said. The scene required him to open a can of beer and drink it with the froth coming out of the can. After shooting this, he had to jump through a tree.
They filmed the first take but Jackie wasn’t satisfied with it. He believed he wasn’t fast enough so they decided to do it again. That needed him to shoot the beer scene again as the two were supposed to be in continuation with one another. By this time, Chan had had more than a few sips of beer and now, when he leaped towards the tree, the branches snapped and he fell to the ground.
“I just feel my back’s hurt. Then I get up, but everybody pushes me down because my whole body was numb. By the time the numbness passed, then I feel my air and I see the blood. We go to the hospital… I almost died,” he recalled.
In the hospital, the surgeons found that the actor’s skull was cracked and a bone had penetrated the cracked skull as a result of the fall. Thankfully, the actor recovered and did not have any severe damage from the injury.
