Actor Hugh Jackman nearly took his head off trying to get to Oprah’s stage.
In celebration of her talk show’s 25th and final season, Oprah Winfrey famously surprised an audience with a trip to Australia, and had Australian actor Hugh Jackman as a guest on one of these on-location episodes. Jackman made a grand entrance, zooming onto the set from a giant zipline, and ended the trip with a collision and an eye injury.
The episode was taped outside the Sydney Opera House, and Jackman’s aerial journey began at the top of one of the House’s iconic sails. The actor appeared in fine form zooming towards the stage, but didn’t apply the brakes in time, and crashed face-first into the lights rigged around the set.
Filming of the episode paused for a few minutes while paramedics tended to Jackman’s injury, and someone was kind enough to get the guy a glass of red wine. He was not seriously injured, and was able to see the humor in the incident, joking, “That was so much fun until the end.”
Local funnyman Dave Hughes remarked, “this is how much we love Oprah, we’ll take our most handsome, intelligent man and we’ll chuck him off the Opera House.”
Source: The Press Association, via The New York Times ArtsBeat Blog
