Kurt Russell Almost Got Severely Injured Doing A Stunt For Quentin Tarantino

There are quite a few actors out there who are good at playing badasses, but Kurt Russell takes it to a whole new level because he actually is one. Russell originally got into acting because it was a way for him to meet famous baseball players while he chased his own sports dreams, but after a brutal injury killed his baseball career, he went into it full-time. He's been acting for decades and starred in several Westerns, becoming such an adept horseback rider that he once hijacked a horse off of the "Tombstone" set for a joyride through the Arizona hills, and he's gathered plenty of other skills over his long and varied career. So when director Quentin Tarantino wanted him to do some dangerous driving in his ode to grindhouse cinema, "Death Proof," Russell was game. 

"Death Proof" has one of the single greatest car chases in cinema history, done at full speed with actor and stunt performer Zoë Bell hanging onto the hood of one of the cars, so clearly some big risks were taken. Unfortunately, it sounds like Tarantino put Russell in some serious danger without warning, part of a disturbing pattern for the director. In an interview with GQ, where Russell broke down his most iconic characters, the actor revealed that he almost met his own death on "Death Proof," and it was because of something completely avoidable.

In the interview, Russell explains that when Tarantino approached him to star in and do some real stunt driving for "Death Proof," he was fine with it because he had been driving since childhood. "As a kid, I won a world championship in a race car," he said. "I can do anything you want in a car." Then, one day, he got a terrible scare when someone didn't properly check and close off entrances to the road they were filming on, giving Russell the all clear to drive in the oncoming lane when it wasn't safe to do so. Russell's instincts and quick reaction time saved him from serious injury or death, but it was a close call, as he explained:

"We come down the road and I don't know what happened, I can't remember what happened. I either saw something or felt something, boom. I just, boy man, I just slammed the brakes on and came, vroom, guy goes by about 50 miles an hour the other way in the lane I was in. And we just pulled over. I was just sitting there for a second.Took the keys out of the car, see you tomorrow."

Russell plays it off pretty nonchalantly, but it had to be terrifying to almost have a head-on collision while you thought you were driving down a closed-off, safe road. That kind of accident wouldn't just be career-ending, but potentially life-ending, and that kind of carelessness with safety should never happen on a set. Mistakes happen, but when you're doing stunts as dangerous as the ones in "Death Proof," extra care should be taken, and Tarantino has a pretty bad track record with actor safety.

There have been a few pretty infamous accidents on Tarantino sets over the years, ranging from Russell accidentally destroying a priceless artifact on the set of "The Hateful Eight" to Leonardo DiCaprio cutting his hand open during a passionate speech in "Django Unchained," but the one that stands out is Uma Thurman's serious injury on the set of "Kill Bill," which the actor revealed to the New York Times in 2018. Tarantino didn't want to use a stunt driver for a sequence with Thurman's character behind the wheel, and he rather cruelly forced her to do the stunt despite her fears of not being trained for that kind of driving. In the end, the car slid off the dirt road, and she hit a tree, leaving her with a neck injury and a concussion. Though Tarantino would later go on to say that the accident was "one of the biggest regrets" of his life, it's absolutely infuriating that another actor was nearly seriously injured or killed on his watch, especially since it happened only a few years after "Kill Bill!"

No matter where you stand on Tarantino's filmography, this kind of thing is inexcusable. Actors are doing a job, and workers deserve to be safe at work. It's one thing for Bell to very knowingly put herself at risk or DiCaprio to just get a bit overzealous with smashing his hand against a table, and something entirely different to put actors' lives on the line. Thank goodness both Thurman and Russell survived to tell their tales, but it's a truly unfortunate footnote on Tarantino's career.