Russell Crowe is opening up about an accident on the set of 201’s Robin Hood that left his legs fractured.
In an interview promoting Land of Bad, Crowe recalled the incident, telling People, “I jumped off a castle portcullis onto rock-hard uneven ground. We should have prepped the ground and buried a pad, but we were in a rush to get the shot done in the fading light.”
“With hundreds of extras around, arrows flying and burn pots setting the castle on fire, there was no pulling out,” he continued. “As I jumped, I remember thinking, ‘This is going to hurt.’”
Crowe seemingly landed on his heels first on the uneven ground, feeling “like an electric shock bursting up through my body.”
“We were shooting a big movie, so you just struggle through, but the last month of that job was very tricky. There was a number of weeks where even walking was a challenge,” he added, noting that he “never discussed the injury with production” and “never took a day off because of it, I just kept going to work.”
Ten years after the incident, Crowe started having pains, and after going to the doctor and getting X-rays, the physician asked when he had broken his legs after spotting “remnants of fractures in both shin bones.”
“Apparently, I finished that movie with two broken legs,” he said. “All for art. No cast, no splints, no painkillers, just kept going to work, and over time, they healed themselves.”
After wrapping up filming Robin Hood, Crowe took time off and didn’t return to film until 2013’s Man of Steel, with the actor noting that “Between the time off and that training [for Man of Steel], things fixed themselves.”