Dev Patel Suffered Painful Injuries While Filming His New Movie ‘Monkey Man’

Dev Patel suffered some serious injuries while filming his new movie Monkey Man, he revealed at SXSW last month. The actor and first-time director sat for a Q&A with the audience after the movie screening, and his anecdotes from the set were harrowing. It started two weeks before shooting began.

“I broke my foot two weeks before [the] shoot, my toes and stuff,” Patel said according to a report by Metro. “That was painful. Then tore my shoulder. And then in the middle of the bathroom fight, day two, I broke my hand. That was like, ‘Okay, here we go again. Production is going to go down.’ I can’t wear a cast on this movie. We don’t have the budget to pain this out [digitally].” Patel admitted that he had to forego his doctor’s advice to rest and went right back to filming.

Patel spoke about his broken hand again in an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show on Friday. He said: “Everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong. In the first action scene, I’m basically a crash-test dummy and my costar is using my face to break every piece of porcelain in this bathroom. And my hand, I heard it snap and I was like, ‘This is not good.’”

Here, Patel emphasized his responsibility to the rest of the cast and crew as both director and star. He said: “You’ve got 450 people on an island and if I go down, the film goes down. “I told my producer, ‘Don’t say anything. Let’s just keep filming.’ By the end of the day my hand was like an elephant’s foot. We couldn’t afford to put a cast on and VFX it out of this movie.” He then gave more details on his visit to the doctor afterward.

“The doctor put a screw in my hand and he goes, ‘You cannot put more than a pound or two on this thing. Otherwise it’s like pulling a bent nail out of wood. You will ruin your bone,’” Patel recalled. “I went back to set the next day and was throwing myself and bouncing off a window.”

Patel’s dedication and perseverance inspired the crew. He said that after the production wrapped, they had a copy of Patel’s X-ray printed onto t-shirts. He explained: “They call it ‘The one screw that kept this production alive.’”

Monkey Man is Patel’s directorial debut. He stars as a man named Kid, an underground club fighter who wears a gorilla mask and takes the fall in public matches for cash. However, as the story goes on he finds himself on a gruesome revenge quest he can’t afford to lose. The movie was originally slated for Netflix but Universal Pictures eventually acquired the rights to play it in theaters. Monkey Man premieres around the U.S. on April 5.