The wresting drama Heels enters the ring this Sunday on Starz and star Stephen Amell said something very unexpected happened on the first day of filming — he broke his back.
Amell, who stars as an amateur wrestler trying to keep tradition alive in a small town, told ABC Audio that he injured himself on a stunt gone wrong.
“I overshot it coast to coast on our first day of filming wrestling stuff and suffered a compression fracture,” the actor confessed, explaining that the injury was between his mid and lower back.
However, he assured that breaking his back wasn’t quite as catastrophic as it sounds.
Said Amell, 40, “I’m very fortunate and lucky that it was an injury that sounds scary, but didn’t require surgery. [It] just sort of healed on its own.”
On the other hand, he says his colleagues freaked out over his broken back.
“I certainly scared a lot of people,” said Amell, noting his phone blew up with people worried about his recovery — including a showrunner who was planning to “shift stuff around” to give him ample time to recover.
“He said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, because we’re going to shift stuff around. We’re going to write you out until Thanksgiving and then we’ll take a break, come back in the New Year,'” he described. “I was like, ‘No… I’ll see you in a couple days.”
After taking “a little bit of time off work,” he was back to the grind… because he loves his job.
Said Amell, who dabbled in the pro-wrestling world, “Anyone who thinks that I’m going to give up the life of hair and makeup and drivers and someone making my breakfast, lunch and dinner, for life on the road in professional wrestling is out of their [expletive] mind!”
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