Exclusive – Jupiter's Legacy star says on-set injury didn't stop him performing stunts: 'I was just in pain doing them'
Being a superhero is risky work.
Ben Daniels has revealed he suffered an agonising injury on the set of Jupiter's Legacy, but kept throwing himself into ambitious stunts regardless.
The actor recently earned praise for his portrayal of Antony Armstrong-Jones in The Crown, but takes on a very different role in the Netflix's upcoming comic book adaptation.
Daniels plays Walter Sampson, AKA Brainwave, one of six superheroes amongst the Jupiter's Legacy cast who have been protecting the planet for a century. He boasts psychic abilities and the power of flight – the latter of which required wire work.
Speaking to RadioTimes.com, he detailed a nasty injury he suffered while rehearsing stunts for the show, which lingered for the entirety of the shoot.
"We were practising flipping in the harness and none of us had done it before," he says. "But the harness was just in a slightly weird place, and we were doing a move where I get pushed backwards and then turn to the side. And as I turned to the side, there was a [noise] sort of in my body and I was like, 'That was a bit weird – what happened?'
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"It felt like a stitch and I carried on – I should have stopped – but I carried on working and it started to get worse and worse and worse, the pain. I’d ruptured a muscle really, really deep inside my body and it took a week for it to come out. I was in agony one night, and I got up and passed out with the pain. I landed on the floor and I just thought, ‘Oh, what do I do? Right now I'm in Canada, is it 911?'"
Daniels was sent off to a specialist where he was "zapped with electricity" three times a week, all the while continuing to work on the show's ambitious action sequences.
"[The injury] was all kind of bound up and strapped, so I then had that under the harness, under the costume, and I had a big lump on my side that took months to go," he explains. "It was pretty gnarly throughout the entire shoot, but it didn't mean that I stopped doing any of the stunts they wanted me to – it was just that I was in pain doing them."
The actor, whose previous fantasy projects include Merlin, Jack the Giant Slayer and Rogue One, is well aware that these scrapes come with the territory on such a production.
"Everyone had something, but I think mine was probably the worst injury, in that it was just ridiculously deep and painful. You couldn't get to it to massage it or anything," he adds. "But I think everyone did something at some point. You can't not, really, when you're being that physical in a show."
Josh Duhamel (Transformers), Leslie Bibb (Iron Man) and Matt Lanter (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) also star in Jupiter's Legacy, based on a comic book by prolific writer Mark Millar.
If you've already finished vol. 1, you can read our Jupiter's Legacy ending explainer for some analysis of the finale.
Jupiter's Legacy is available on Netflix from Friday 7th May. Check out more of our Sci-Fi and Fantasy coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
