Up Till Now: The Autobiography

knocks me down, and I roll to the precipice, right to the edge, then he takes a sword—a sword!—and slashes at my head. His sword comes down just to the right of my head, I move my head to the left, then he slashes to my left and I move my head to the right. Right-left, right-left. Got it? Got it.
    Finally it was time to shoot. My problem was that I had to be at the very edge of this cliff. So I laid down on my back about eight feet from the edge and crawled backward so I could get to the edge without looking down. I was truly frightened. I could have been attached to a cable, but I didn’t want to do that; instead another stuntman was holding my leg. We went through the action in slow motion, “You’re going to my right, I’ll go to my left. Raise the sword. You’re going to my left, I’ll go to my right. Okay, let’s do it, and please, let’s get it right the first time because I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”
    All right, ready, roll film, action. Now, I have never been certain whether I was to blame or if it was the stuntman’s fault. I went one way, he went the same way and he slashed me right in the forehead.I started bleeding. I mean, really bleeding. The stuntman was mortified. “Oh jeez,” he said. “We gotta get you to a hospital.”
    “I’m not going anywhere. I’m never going to be able to get this close to the edge again. Just patch me up and let’s get this done.”
    “But there’s a flap of skin...” “I’m not moving. Push it back, tape it down, and put my hair over it.” They stopped the bleeding and wiped off the blood. The second stuntman was still holding my leg. I hadn’t moved.
    And then I noticed the first stuntman glaring at me. Now that I was okay he was free to get angry at me for messing up the stunt; I’d made him look bad, he’d hurt the star. And then he picked up the sword again...
    When we finally finished shooting the scene I said, “Drag me out of here.” Because I was still too terrified to move.
    I couldn’t possibly even guess the number of stunt fights I’ve had in my career. I was actually pretty good at it. The key, I learned early, was knowing how to fall. And I’d learned that taking judo lessons. The proper way to fall is to expand your arms so that your entire body hits the ground at the same time. That spreads the energy of the fall. That’s what professional wrestlers do. It makes a great thumping sound too. If you want to roll when you hit the ground you’ve got to hit the ground with a curved arm so you’re actually a hub. You roll on your arms and there’s no pain whatsoever.
    Stunt falling requires a lot of training because you have to be able to sense where your body is in space, which enables you to anticipate the impact and properly distribute your energy. And when done correctly it looks painfully real. In the movie Showtime with Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro, I played myself as T.J. Hooker teaching real cops standard TV cop procedures. In one scene I was supposed to show Eddie Murphy how to leap over the hood of a car—but I decided to make it look as if I hurt my back showing him how to do it without getting hurt. The first time I did it I rolled across the hood and fell behind the car. As I got up crew members were running over to me—it had looked so real they thought I was hurt and had stopped shooting.
    People do get hurt in stunt fights. Actors get excited and lose their sense of space and have hit stuntmen. A lot of stuntmen are afraid of actors because they get crazed. Even I’ve gotten hit by other actors in fights. I always keep my punches short. As long as the camera is behind you the punches only have to travel six inches to look real. Once I became a leading man I don’t remember ever losing a fight. While making Star Trek I was fighting all the time; I’d fight two men, three men at a time, and I would beat all of them. I was a very tough stunt fighter, as long as I had morality and the script on my side.
    I was such a good stunt fighter I’ve even fought with myself on several different programs and movies. On Star Trek , for example, we occasionally ended up with two Kirks battling it out. In a movie called White Comanche I played half-breed Indian twin brothers who had to fight to the death. In those instances one of me was a stunt-man whose body vaguely resembled mine and we shot over his shoulder. So perhaps I could have played both Caesar and Brutus in the Julius Caesar musical