Scenes That Made Actors Vomit On The Set

Being an actor isn't always glitz and glamor. Sometimes it means working long days and hard nights, often with constant pressure to always be at your best no matter what the conditions. That might mean sucking it up to deliver a solid performance in bad weather, executing daring stunts on an action movie, or just giving it your all even if you're not feeling your best — because productions don't stop for anything less than a total catastrophe. Unfortunately, that can mean that even when an actor is feeling ill, the show must go on.

While movie-going audiences have become familiar with shocking, gross-out vomit scenes, there are times on the set when a puking performer isn't part of the script. Not quite improv, it can happen when an actor least expects it, and they're usually forced to wipe up, soldier on, and keep filming. From TV cast members whose stomachs were turned in a stunt to movie stars who ate prop food till they hurled, here's a list of scenes in movies 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."

It's one thing when an actor wants to overindulge in filming a food scene, as Zoey Deutch did on the set of "Set It Up." It's an entirely different matter, however, when it isn't the actor's choice. In fact, in the case of a now-famous scene in "The Wolf of Wall Street," one actor's major up-chuck happened after a co-star put forth a dare during an impromptu moment. That star was Leonardo DiCaprio, and it happened when filming a scene where he and co-star Jonah Hill were eating a selection of sushi.

According to director Martin Scorsese during an appearance on "Conan," the scene as written had Hill's character scooping up the last piece of sushi. But in an unplanned ad-lib, Hill offered the final piece to DiCaprio, who quickly gobbled it up. Really liking the unscripted moment, Scorsese kept it in, but had to film dozens of additional takes in the next few hours. Of course — ever the committed actor — the former "Titanic" star ate piece after piece of yellowtail sushi. "He had to ... eat pieces of sashimi all night," Hill told Entertainment Weekly, describing it as his favorite scene in the movie. "By the end of the night, he was on the floor throwing up into a waste bin."

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." 

Millie Bobby Brown's breakout role as Seven on the Netflix original sci-fi thriller series "Stranger Things" made her one of the biggest stars in Hollywood almost overnight. Her role as the enigmatic young girl with otherworldly psychic powers required her to participate in daring stuntwork as she manipulates objects and fights monsters. One of those stunts caused Brown to spew when she was asked to be a part of some wild wirework.

"I don't like climbing, and falling makes me feel sick," Brown told The Sun. "I'm really bad at motion sickness. ... On 'Stranger Things' and 'Damsel,' if I do it one too many times I am outside [vomiting] and everybody's like, 'Oh God, Millie.' I'm a nightmare!" On her Instagram page in 2019, she posted a behind-the-scenes shot of the Netflix series where she can be seen hooked up to stunt wires (via The Daily Mail). Her caption also made it clear it wasn't an easy sequence to film, admitting that she threw up just moments after the shot was taken.

Surprisingly, the stunt in question wasn't part of one of the more disgusting scenes in "Stranger Things." Instead, it involved Seven tumbling head over heels in the air, a dramatic reaction to using her psychic powers to find season antagonist Billy (Dacre Montgomery). That moment came in Season 3's "Chapter Six: E Pluribus Unum." Still, the experience didn't dissuade Brown from doing wirework again on her 2024 Netflix film "Damsel."

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.

Sydney Sweeney, breakout star of HBO's "Euphoria," joined the superhero ranks in 2023 when she was cast in Sony's Spider-Man-less Spider-verse entry "Madame Web." There she starred as future Spider-Woman Julia Cornwall. The film was a huge flop, both critically and commercially, but the movie's failure hasn't bothered Sweeney. Instead, the thing that probably upset Sweeney the most about "Madame Web" was the day she vomited on the set due to harsh conditions and some uncomfortable costuming.

"I had a wig so it was a whole other process," the actor told Cosmopolitan. "That wig was so hot — we were filming in Boston in the middle of the summer." Apparently, it also happened to be one of the hottest days of the shoot when Sweeney felt something was wrong. "We were in the middle of filming and I go, 'One second,' and I turn around and I just started throwing up, and then I turn back and I go, 'We're all good we can keep going.'" According to Sweeney, the combination of the extreme heat and blonde wig caused her to overheat, triggering a sudden bout of nausea. Probably not the same kind that audiences had when they saw the movie, though.

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."

Jake Gyllenhaal is the kind of actor who can do it all, and in his long career, he has lived that mantra too. From critically acclaimed thrillers to romantic comedies, Gyllenhaal is just as at home in a gritty, Oscar-winning drama as he is in a big-budget popcorn flick. But he may have found the Marvel Cinematic Universe a little unsteady because according to the actor, he threw up right in the middle of a scene with Tom Holland — Spider-Man himself.

"We were shooting a scene, and I got sick," Jake Gyllenhaal told an audience while appearing with Holland and Tom Hanks on "The Graham Norton Show." "I was very nauseous throughout the day, and ... I threw up in the middle of a take and kept going but that's what acting is all about." Holland said Gyllenhaal had a stomach bug on that day. Sensing a deep discomfort among the guests and audience, Gyllenhaal then jokingly tried to claim that the scene was used in the final cut and that Marvel had CGI'd the vomit out of the shot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the good-natured Hanks believed every word.

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.

History has shown that live-action movies based on video games are tough to get right. So when the racing franchise "Gran Turismo" got the feature film treatment, producers opted to tell the true story of Jann Mardenborough, a "Gran Turismo" video game player who embarks on a real racing career. The leading role was played by Archie Madekwe, who didn't have any racing experience, let alone a driver's license. But he at least had time to train behind the wheel before suiting up on the track. Unfortunately, even practice couldn't help his upset stomach.

"You very quickly realize whether you're built correctly for being a racecar driver or not, and I am not," Madekwe remarked while talking to Empire Magazine (via our sister site /Film). According to the actor, there were multiple times when he'd have to take a quick break and "open the door of the car and just throw up everywhere." How's that for your first experience behind the wheel? Well, it turns out it was also the last for Madekwe, who hasn't driven since. "Can you blame me?" the actor asked. "I'm scarred!"

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.

Soon after "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" came the "Halloween" franchise, another slasher series about a masked killer and his often-teenage victims. Like "Texas Chain Saw," the "Halloween" franchise has plenty of disturbing themes that continue to scare audiences decades after its first installment. For the fifth film, 1989's "Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers," it wasn't the upsetting nature of the violent story that upset child star Danielle Harris. Instead, it was a vicious bout of food poisoning.

"There is a scene in 'Halloween 5' where I am running in front of a car and through the woods before Michael Myers smashes the car into a tree," Harris recalled in an interview with Channel Guide Magazine in 2009 for the 20th anniversary of the film. "And I remember going to work that day with food poisoning and in between running and screaming and crying, as soon as they would yell 'cut' I would throw up." 

But even at just 11 years old, the actor — who played the on-screen daughter of Jamie Lee Curtis' "Halloween" protagonist Laurie Strode — was determined to power through and give the best performance she could. "You've got to work," she said. "Production doesn't stop for you. That just shows you how excited I was and how much I wanted to be there and do my job and run from Michael Myers."

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."