Scenes That Made Actors Vomit On The Set

When an actor unexpectedly sends chunks flying on the set of a horror movie, it might not come as much of a surprise. But unexpected oral expulsions can occur on the set of just about any movie, as it did to Zoey Deutch while making the Netflix romantic comedy "Set It Up."

Speaking to Hello Giggles in 2018, Deutch talked about her commitment to the role of Harper Moore, a disgruntled assistant looking to get even with her overbearing boss. For a big pizza-eating scene, she even went so far as to devour four full pizzas rather than spit out each bite between takes as is common when filming such a scene. "It was an awesome opportunity to eat pizza, which, if you know me, you know I love pizza and I love pasta," she said, expressing her initial excitement about the scene. She even asked for a specific pizza from a favorite restaurant.

But while director Claire Scanlon implored her to use a spit bucket, Deutch refused, and before long things went south. "I threw up violently halfway through the scene," the actress said. "And then I had to proceed to be very close to [co-star] Glen Powell, who now, I think, looks at me in a very different light. So that was something that happened."

Though none of the actors lost their lunch, a cameraman vomited all over Kevin Bacon on the set of "Apollo 13" due to the strange sensations of filming in zero gravity. Nausea is one of the issues of filming in zero-G environments that actors rarely talk about, but that same problem affected nearly the entire cast of "Top Gun: Maverick" decades later. As it happens, Monica Barbaro and Jay Ellis, playing fighter pilots nicknamed Phoenix and Payback, were apparently the only two actors to not make a mess of their cockpits while filming those very real zero-G flight scenes.

"A lot of people [threw up]," Barbaro said in an interview with Glamour. "Honestly, my hat goes off to them because the idea of throwing up regularly and then continuing this job is just insane to me. ... They had to throw up and recover and keep filming. Jay Ellis and I were basically the ones who didn't." As Barbaro tells it, her steely stomach was the result of years of dance training. "I've been going upside down forever," Barbaro said. "I would do handstands before flights. ... It helped me control some of the weird feelings of blood rushing to spaces you don't usually want it to." 

After starring in one of the biggest movies of all time with "The Avengers," Mark Ruffalo kicked off another movie series in 2013 with "Now You See Me." In the film, Ruffalo plays Dylan Rhodes, an FBI agent on the hunt for a team of criminal magicians played by Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Jesse Eisenberg, and Dave Franco. The film's sequel, following the revelation that Rhodes was a magician himself — sees Ruffalo get a bit more action, including a major fight scene. But all that action led to a scene where Ruffalo got seriously sick.

Appearing on "Today" while promoting the movie, Ruffalo revealed that after a stunt where he had to emerge from almost drowning, his co-stars cringed when he vomited all over himself. But according to Ruffalo, Harrelson probably shouldn't have been so surprised. "First, I ate Woody Harrelson's fake cheesecake, which was like a raw cashew cheesecake," Ruffalo said. Already feeling queasy, Ruffalo went into the water for a scene where his character nearly drowns and then emerges from the water coughing. "Then all of a sudden, I throw up!" As Ruffalo tells it, he'd swallowed a bit too much water while submerged. A behind-the-scenes clip provided by presenter Savannah Guthrie showed Eisenberg, Harrelson, and co-star Lizzy Caplan recoiling in horror at Ruffalo's retching.

In addition to an Oscar-winning acting career, Angelina Jolie is also a director. She helmed the 2014 drama "Unbroken," which tells the remarkable true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II while serving in the US Army Air Forces. Jack O'Connell plays Zamperini, while Japanese pop star Miyavi plays his brutal prison camp commander Mutsuhiro Watanabe. For Miyavi, the dramatic story of Zamperini's captivity was an emotional experience — one that caused him an upset stomach that he emptied all over the set.

"It was awful torture for me to hate the other actors — I had to have hatred for them," Miyavi explained to Vanity Fair (via E! Online). To get into character, he said he had to find the most painful thoughts he could conjure up. "When I had to beat them, I had to think about protecting my family. At the same time, I didn't want to be just a bad guy. I wanted to put humanity in this role. [Matsuhiro] was both crazy and sadistic, but also weak and traumatized."

Miyavi credited director Jolie with helping him get his peak performance through all of his roiling emotions. "It's a story that is still painful for my country," Miyavi said. "But [Jolie] told me she wanted to make a bridge between all countries that had conflict. She was very persuasive."

The 2018 survival drama "Adrift" may have floated under most people's radar, but it's a film that star Shailene Woodley isn't likely to forget. Co-starring Sam Claflin, "Adrift" chronicles the experiences of a real-life couple who were lost at sea amid Hurricane Raymond in 1983. Set almost entirely within the confines of a small boat on the open ocean, the boat and ocean could have been fully CG, but director Baltasar Kormákur opted to do it for real. And that didn't sit well with Woodley's stomach.

"We filmed over 90% of this movie on the open sea," Woodley revealed on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" "It was terrible sometimes. The days where everyone got seasick and couldn't stop puking, those were not fun days." Nearly everyone, in front of and behind the camera, was affected, with only two exceptions: "Everybody except for our director and our cinematographer, conveniently, was just ... we were gone." She said that while everyone was hurling overboard, it was hard to actually do the work because the hair and makeup people, the sound department, and the cameramen were all puking between takes.

If there's any horror movie set that you'd expect to have turned into a literal vomitorium, it's the set of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," the 1974 splatter shocker that kicked off the American slasher subgenre. One could even argue that were it not for this seminal classic, on-set puking might not be so prevalent these days. Because "Texas Chain Saw" might be one of the first films to make its cast puke from the sheer horror of the subject matter, not to mention the wretched working conditions.

The 2019 Joseph Lanza book "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified A Rattled Nation" covers the horrific nature of the production, which was almost as bad as the on-screen horror. According to Lanza, the filming location of Round Rock, Texas, saw temperatures reaching 115 degrees, and the film's climactic dinner table scene was compressed into a single nonstop 26-hour shoot. Cast members couldn't wash their wardrobes for continuity reasons, and rotting animal carcasses littered the location and the set. Trapped inside the house set when the heat was at its worst, the cast suffered heat and humidity that were so unbearable that they needed not just breaks to catch their breath but to empty their stomachs as well.

Whether because of food poisoning, the disturbing nature of a scene, or the queasiness brought on by a topsy-turvy stunt, vomiting on set is clearly not an uncommon occurrence in Hollywood. But for Johnny Lee Miller, it wasn't any of those reasons that caused him to do the technicolor yawn (that's slang for vomiting, according to Google). Instead, it was the raw emotion of being reunited with a cast of old friends for the first time in decades.

It happened on the first day of rehearsals on the legacy sequel "T2 Trainspotting," the long-awaited follow-up to the British cult classic from 1992 starring Miller, Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, and Kevin McKidd. "I was so nervously excited and I ended up throwing up in the bathroom," Miller told Empire Magazine (via the Scottish Sun). "It was like, 'Nice to see you, I gotta go vomit,'" he said. Considering their characters had all once been drug-addled drifters who'd often barf up a lung after a bender, it somehow made sense. "It just felt weirdly, awfully appropriate for 'Trainspotting,' throwing up in a bathroom," he said. "Having not seen the guys for years, I hoped they didn't think I had some awful drug habit."