From skyscraper-height gorillas to shark-infested tornadoes, the film industry surely has served us a lot of wild stories. However, sometimes, the wildest Hollywood stories come from behind the scenes.
Here are 16 of the wildest experiences actors and crew had on set:
1.In order to make it through the daily eight-hour makeup session it took to transform him into the titular character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jim Carrey was trained by a man who teaches CIA operatives how to endure torture.
2.The Tunisian government asked George Lucas to move his Sandcrawler away from the Libyan border during the filming of Star Wars: A New Hope because Libya mistook it for an army vehicle and threatened military action.
3.Isla Fisher almost drowned when her release chain got stuck on her costume during a magic trick scene in Now You See Me.
4.During a battle scene in Ben-Hur, an extra fell into a pond that had been dyed blue, and MGM kept him on its payroll until the dye wore off of him.
5.A majority of the Titanic cast and crew were poisoned with PCP-spiked clam chowder, so they were all rushed to the hospital at 1 a.m.
6.When Benedict Cumberbatch and his friends' tire blew out on the way back to the To the Ends of the Earth set, they were kidnapped at gunpoint before being left in the middle of nowhere.
7.While Melissa George was filming in a boathouse for The Amityville Horror (2005), local police arrived to inform the production that a dead body had been found floating nearby.
8.While filming the Wicked Witch of the West's smoke-filled exit from Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz, actor Margaret Hamilton suffered burns on her hands and face.
9.While filming The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Jennifer Carpenter's radio continuously turned on in the middle of the night and played the words "I'm still alive" over and over.
10.Police showed up on the set of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines and took everyone's passports after discovering they were using unidentified bodies purchased from a grave robber as props.
11.JoBeth Williams unknowingly filmed a Poltergeist scene in a pool full of real skeletons because production deemed fake ones "too expensive."
12.After The Possession wrapped, the prop storage building burned down, destroying the imitation demon-possessed dybbuk box the movie centered on.
13.While filming the Sermon on the Mount scene in The Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning.
14.After finding out lead actor Malcolm McDowell was terrified of snakes, director Stanley Kubrick introduced the character Basil, a boa constrictor, to A Clockwork Orange.
15.While playing Chewbacca in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Peter Mayhew had to be escorted through the Pacific Northwest by crew members in brightly colored vests so that other people wouldn't mistake him for Bigfoot and shoot him.
16.And finally, Michael Imperioli cut his hand on broken glass on the Goodfellas set and was rushed to the hospital, but the ER doctors rushed to treat the fake bullet wounds from the death scene he'd been filming instead.
