Death-Defying Stunts: A-List Actors Who Risked Their Lives for Movies to Make Box Office Hits

While shooting a scene where he jumped from one building to another, Tom Cruise smashed his ankle against the side of a wall. The actor suffered a broken ankle, but the take was used in the actual film.

"I didn’t want to do it again. I knew instantly it was broken and I just ran past the camera," he said.

After cutting his leg during filming, Tom Hanks developed an awful staph infection, which doctors said could have killed him had he not received treatment.

Bruce Willis permanently lost two-thirds of his hearing after a machine gun fired extra loud blanks on set while he was running past it.

After a tackle from WWE legend Steve Austin broke his neck and dislocated his shoulders, Sylvester Stallone needed spinal fusions and a metal plate installed in his neck. So far, he has had seven surgeries to correct his injuries.

"I never recovered," he said. "After that film, it was never physically the same. So I warn people, ‘Don’t do your own stunts.’"

It may be easier for Hugh Jackman to list his body parts that DIDN’T get injured playing Wolverine. He hurt his right ear, upper left thigh, left eye and neck. But the worst? When his groin got caught in a harness while dropping down the side of the Statue of Liberty.

"That was pretty brutal," Jackman confided. "I screamed so much, and they kept going because they figured it was me primal yell emoting."

Jackie Chan has sustained many injuries throughout his career, but one of the worst was on the set of this film, when he leaped from a cliff to a tree, fell 40 feet, and landed on a rock. One of his bones ended up puncturing his brain, and he nearly died as a result.

While shooting an MMA scene in her film, Halle Berry got kicked by her costar (real-life martial arts fighter Valentina Shevchenko) and broke two ribs as a result.

The injury did not stop Berry from finishing the scene: "The fighter in me stood up and said, ‘You just have to keep going, take some Advil and tough your way through it.’"

Keanu Reeves needed a couple of epidurals to get through a bulging and fractured disc so severe.

"I started to lose balance. My spinal column was being sausaged basically, so I had to have a two-level fusion on my spine before training, and they put a plate in my neck," he said.

But he didn’t tell anyone because he was up for The Matrix until he landed the role of Neo and "I had to train in a neck brace."

Johnny Depp was thrown from a galloping horse, dragged through a desert, and trampled by the animal in a scene from the film. Fortunately, he only ended up with a very bad bruise on his stomach.

"I was very lucky, because it could have been horrific," he commented.

As a result of falling off a stack of 20 chairs in a scene, Jeremy Renner broke both of his arms.

"I knew when I hit the ground that it wasn’t good," he revealed.