In addition to the enormous physical preparation Jake Gyllenhaal underwent to get himself into fighting shape for Road House, which releases on Prime Video on March 21, the 43-year-old also had to film some pretty intense fight scenes. And at one point during filming, Gyllenhaal revealed that he actually contracted a potentially dangerous staph infection.
The actor opened up about the grueling fight scenes during an appearance on Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast this week, alongside his Road House co-star and UFC champion, Conor McGregor. "There's so much physical fighting, and reenacting of fighting," Shepard pointed out, asking the pair if they were injured at any point.
While it sounds as if there was no shortage of minor injuries on set, Gyllenhaal brought up one scene in particular in which a vehicle crashes into the bar, and he cut his hand pretty badly on some glass.
"Sometimes in those scenes, we’re fighting on the floor, fighting around tables, we’re fighting around glass, even if it's breakaway glass," he explained. "I have to jump over the bar as the car crashes, but [director Doug Liman] wanted to do it in a very particular way ... I go over the bar, it's CGI'ed, that truck coming in, but we had to do the whole thing and the door's opening and all that."
"And then, so I get up, and I was supposed to have been a little out of it, and I put my hand on the bar—f--ckin' straight glass," Gyllenhaal continued. "I felt the glass going in my hand. So that's the part where I slammed the door on his leg, right? So I have to just finish that off so it can get to that point."
"I remember the feeling like, 'That’s a lot of glass,' and I just finished the take," he recalled. But initially, he wasn't even sure how he contracted the infection due to the frequency of incidents like that.
"My whole arm swelled up. It ended up being staph. There were things like that that happened all the time, but gratefully, I was really, really trying to take care of everything," Gyllenhaal added. "I didn't sustain any major injuries, which is easily a testament to the team I was working with."
According to Mayo Clinic, staph infections are caused by bacteria entering the skin of otherwise healthy people. And while typically the bacteria causes no major problems, or relatively minor skin infections, it can turn deadly if the bacteria invades deeper into the body and enters the bloodstream, joints, bones, lungs, or heart.
But when you're an action star, apparently that's all just part of a day's work.
