As we are fond of pointing out, sometimes the most convicing performances you see in movies aren't skillful acting at all, but genuine moments of humiliation, terror, and/or insanity perpetrated by actors with varying levels of willingness that's been captured forever on film for our enjoyment. As the old adage goes: If you want a head injury to look real, you have to convince your actor to cut his own fucking head open.

5 Channing Tatum Smashed His Face Through A Mirror And Permanently Injured Mark Ruffalo In Foxcatcher

Sony Pictures Classics

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In Foxcatcher, Channing Tatum plays wrestler Mark Schultz, and became so invested in the role that he sustained multiple injuries by the time filming was done. It seems nobody explained to him that "acting" means "pretending," and does not mean you have magically transformed into another person and are now doomed to recreate the events of their life.

In one scene, Mark Ruffalo, who plays Schultz's brother, was supposed to slap him in the face, but he was holding back because, well, he was acting (see "pretending" above). After a few bad takes, Tatum lost his cool with Ruffalo and shouted "C'mon man, I'm trying to act here. What is that? Come on! Be a man! Hit me!" Ruffalo didn't hold back the next time, and slapped Tatum so hard that he broke his eardrum, because that's what happens when you yell at the goddamn Hulk.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Hearing loss may explain some roles he later agreed to.

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In another scene, Schultz loses his temper and smashes his face into a mirror over and over again in an explosion of blood and glass. It was an incredibly intense moment, and it wasn't in the script at all. Tatum's character was only supposed to smack himself in the head a few times. But when it came time to film the sequence, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, sunk her maniacal fangs into his brain, and he headbutted the mirror so hard that he put a hole in the drywall behind it. The blood in this scene is real, because as we mentioned, Tatum put his head through a wall, through a mirror.

Sony Pictures Classics

Uh ... We had a joke, but are too scared to make it ...

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Tatum blurred the line between actor and psychopath so well that he even wound up injuring Ruffalo, who by his own admission was already intimidated by Tatum's size, and was given no reason to question his fear after Tatum destroyed a mirror with his face. During one scene in which their characters wrestle, Tatum attacked Ruffalo so fiercely that Ruffalo suffered a permanent neck injury. It is unclear whether this was payback for the eardrum thing, but the scary thing is that it probably had nothing to do with it.