It's becoming more and more common to hear stories about celebrities doing their own stuntwork, and recently Rachel Weisz revealed a doozy. While filming a scene on horseback for My Cousin Rachel, the star revealed a horse trained to do a stunt rolled on her while she was filming a sequence. And, she says we can blame Game of Thrones for what went down on the set of her new movie. Here's what she told Graham Norton on a recent episode of The Graham Norton Show.
It had been trained on Game of Thrones, and it had been taught and Camilla--she's a brilliant horsewoman and trains all her horses--and I don't want to make it sound like it was dangerous, but it was really dangerous. Apparently this horse had been trained to die. So if you pulled his left reign very hard, he would very elegantly collapse his front legs and back legs and lie down. These are great big giant thoroughbred stallions. So I cantered out in the shot, and pulled the left reign and he just 'died' on his left side. I was on the left side, so he 'died' on me. It wasn't unpainful, but it was OK. Everything went silent.
Rachel Weisz wasn't specific when she talked about what her horse on the set of My Cousin Rachel was previously doing on Game of Thrones, but that movie has featured plenty of fighting scenes in the past. Just last season, the HBO drama aired an episode called "The Battle of the Bastards" in which soldiers supporting Jon Snow fought against soldiers supporting Ramsay Bolton--many of them on horseback. There were a lot of horses charging and more, and it's nice to know that they were properly trained to get the shots needed without causing any problems for the horses themselves. (Although Game of Thrones team would probably tell you the horses were a pain in the rear.)
Still, in this case it turned out to be to Rachel Weisz's detriment. Although she did all of her own horseback riding scenes on the set of My Cousin Rachel and did seem to be prepped for the left reign possibility, there was still a mistake on the set and it could have turned out horribly. And we wonder why actors and actresses are so expensive to insure... Let's just be thankful that the horse was properly trained, got off of her immediately and that neither the actress nor the horse suffered any major harm.
Despite this harrowing story, don't expect My Cousin Rachel to be a super stunt-oriented story. The movie just hit theaters this weekend, and is a romantic thriller based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel of the same name, about a man who plots revenge against the woman he thinks killed his father figure, only to find himself falling for said woman. You can take a look at the other romance movies coming to theaters soon with our full list.
