Dev Patel opens up about how he shot Monkey man with a broken arm.
During Friday’s episode Tonight’s show, the actor spoke with Jimmy Fallon about his experience co-writing, directing and starring in the film. The 33-year-old described in detail the difficulties he had when filming during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” he recalled. “In the first action scene, I’m basically a crash test dummy, and my coworker uses my face to break every piece of china in this bathroom,” he recalled. “And my arm, I heard it snap and I said, ‘This is not good.'”
“You have 450 people on an island and if I go down, the movie goes down,” he said. “I told my producer, ‘Don’t say anything. Let’s just keep shooting.’ By the end of the day, my arm was like an elephant’s leg. We couldn’t afford to put actors and VFX out of this film.”
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Patel said strict quarantine protocols made it difficult for the cast to seek treatment. However, he managed to sneak onto a private medical jet and see a doctor in Jakarta, Indonesia.
“The doctor put a screw in my arm and said, ‘You can’t put more than a pound or two on this thing. Otherwise it’s like pulling a bent nail out of a tree. You will destroy your bone,’” the Slumdog Millionaire said the star. “The next day I went back to the set and was throwing myself and bouncing off the window.”
Patel told Fallon that after the crew finished filming, they made his X-ray into a T-shirt. The shirt features an x-rayed image of his hand on the sleeve, a COVID bubble on the front and a cartoon monkey on the back as a nod to the film.
“They call him ‘The One Screw That Kept This Production Alive,'” Patel joked.
Dev Patel cries after his directorial debut Monkey man Gets a standing ovation at the SXSW world premiere
Dev Patel.
Roger Kisby/Getty Images for Universal Pictures
Monkey man stars the Oscar-nominated actor as a man named Kid “who ekes out a miserable living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for money,” according to Universal Pictures’ official synopsis for the film. In the end, the Kid wants to take revenge on a group of men who left him with trauma from his childhood, according to the synopsis.
After receiving a standing ovation at the film’s premiere at SXSW earlier this month, Patel told PEOPLE, “We almost faced absolute disaster so many times with this movie, and for Universal to see it, to have that kind of response, Jordan [Peele]to see it, pick it up off the floor, dust it off and put it back on the mantelpiece is a big deal.”
“I put my all into it and I hope the world responds to it,” Patel told PEOPLE.
Monkey man will premiere in theaters on April 5.
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