We all love Jackie Chan for doing his own insane stunts but the flipside of that is that he’s broken pretty much every bone in his body in the name of entertainment. Here five times Jackie managed to cheat death and live to fight another day.
5. The Accidental Spy: Injured Tailbone causing temporary paralysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJr8oOhFf7s
For 2001’s The Accidental Spy, Jackie played Bei, a lowly salesman at a sporting goods store who gets caught in a crazy espionage adventure. During filming, Jackie injured the cartilage in his tailbone and suffered temporary paralysis.
4. The Young Master: Almost suffocated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KDldWDtteo
Young Master, one of Jackie’s earlier films, found him as Dragon Lung, who would return in Dragon Lord in 1982. While filming a stunt, Jackie injured his throat and almost suffocated as a result.
3. Project A: Neck injury from 60 foot fall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLDp8Gzdp8
In an homage to Safety Last!, the Harold Lloyd classic, Jackie hung from the clock hands of a clocktower that was 60 ft in the air. Anyone else would do one take and be down with it but Jackie actually did the fall three times, one time suffering a brutal landing that caused a serious neck injury. He was afraid of letting himself fall so all three times, Jackie just held on until his grip finally gave in.
2. Police Story: Burned while falling 25 ft.
The climactic stunt of Police Story 1 finds Jackie’s Sgt. Ka-Kui sliding down a 25ft pole covered in lightbulbs, which burst on his way down. The lights caused the metal pole to get extremely hot, so Jackie was being burned all the way down and then, upon landing, suffered a serious tailbone/back injury.
1. Armor of God: Cracked skull after falling out of a tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yEeWsPA-5g
In what seems like a relatively easy stunt, at least in terms of Jackie Chan, was the opening stunt of Armor of God aka Operation Condor, where Jackie’s Asian Hawk is escaping a temple and leaps from a wall to a tree branch. The first take, the one used in the film, went fine, but Jackie insisted on another take and missed the branch, crashing down the tree and hit a rock, cracking his skull and putting a piece of bone into his brain. He had to have surgery and now has a hole in his skull with a plastic plug and slight hearing loss in his left ear.