How A Fallen Horse Put An Indiana Jones Stuntman In The Hospital
"Raiders of the Lost Ark" starts with Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones venturing into a booby-trapped tomb, defying death at every turn and escaping with the golden idol (which, it turns out was really just a cheap souvenir). Throughout the 1981 adventure epic, Indy finds himself in similarly precarious situations, managing to narrowly escape with his life in each instance. Frankly, filming "Raiders" itself sounds about as perilous.
There's a reason director Steven Spielberg was amazed Ford and his stunt team survived the shoot. He and his crew took several risks when it came to filming the action that could have easily resulted in tragedy, like making Ford run in front of a real 300-pound boulder for his dramatic tomb escape. The star even got his right leg trapped under a plane during the flying-wing fight scene. But Spielberg did have his limits. Ford was prohibited from doing the stunts that were more likely to lead to actual death. Those were reserved for the stunt team, who literally risked their lives to pull off such memorable scenes as the horse and truck chase through the desert.
One of the lucky performers given the task of pulling off literal death-defying feats was Ford's stunt double Vic Armstrong, who thanks to his prolific stunt work across multiple decades in the industry, is nothing short of a Hollywood legend. Armstrong returned to the Indy franchise for 1984's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." He's also known for his work on the James Bond franchise, the first three "Superman" movies, and numerous other high-profile projects. But Armstrong's impressive career almost ended early after a particularly nasty accident involving a horse.
A horse almost ended Armstrong's career early
These days, actors are increasingly performing their own dangerous stunts. But at 77, Vic Armstrong has established himself as one of, if not the greatest stunt performer in Hollywood history. His career, however, was almost cut short in the 1970s. In a Reddit Q&A, Armstrong was asked if he'd ever been hurt performing a stunt, to which he replied that he'd sustained "a lot of injuries over the years," adding, "I've broken a shin bone, a shoulder, a couple of ribs and an arm, but that's over many years over the course of my career." But one of his worst injuries occurred early in his career when he was filming abroad. Armstrong explained:
"The worst things are sprains in ligaments, not broken bones. I had a horse fall on me in the 1970s in Morocco, which was dramatic because in the 1970s Morocco was not the best place to go for surgery, but I had a great surgeon who did a great job. I was a young man in those days, and Morocco was a different country."
Armstrong doesn't name the film in question, but he'd only worked as a stunt double on four other major films before "Raiders of the Lost Ark": 1978's "Superman," 1979's "Bear Island," and 1980's "Superman II" and "Flash Gordon." Considering "Raiders" features a horse chase scene filmed in Tunisia, which like Morocco is on the North coast of Africa, it might seem as though the stunt performer is misremembering his experience and actually got injured while filming "Raiders." But as it turns out, Steven Spielberg and his dodgy production weren't responsible for this particular mishap.
Vic Armstrong's Horse injury was a lot worse than you think
As the Huffington Post notes, Vic Armstrong began wrangling horses on the set of 1966's "Arabesque," working as a stunt rider for the production after having grown up as the son of an Olympic horse trainer. After that, Armstrong continued working with horses on the set of various films, including 1976's "Mohammed Messenger of God." It was on this project that he was injured by a falling horse, requiring a metal plate to be inserted in his shin. In fact, it seems the whole experience was even more traumatic than Armstrong let on in his Reddit Q&A. As the stuntman told Vanity Fair:
"The shin plate I got on 'Muhammad: Messenger of God,' and that one was definitely the most memorable. I was trying to teach a horse named Mars how to fall, and he ended up doing a somersault on top of me. We were in Morocco, and after the operation, they took me to a mortuary because the hospital didn't have any available beds. I woke up next to a dead woman on a stretcher."
Whether he was operated on in the mortuary or eventually moved to a hospital for surgery remains unclear, but waking up next to a corpse must have been a horrifying experience for even a hardened stunt performer. What's more, this was the second metal plate for Armstrong, who also had one fitted to his shoulder after being injured on 1971's "Mary, Queen of Scots." Thankfully, Armstrong was able to recover and go on to become the legendary stuntman he is. Meanwhile, Harrison Ford is cursing out stunt crews for trying to help him off horses, something which he might reconsider in light of Armstrong's experience.