Jake Gyllenhaal is opening up about the challenges he faced while filming the remake of Road House, due out this Thursday.
Appearing on this week’s episode of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast, Gyllenhaal recalled cutting his hand while working on a fight scene in the movie, which co-stars Daniela Melchior and Conor McGregor.
“We’re fighting on the floor, we’re fighting around tables. We’re fighting around glass, even if it’s breakaway glass,” he explained.
“I put my hand on the bar, fucking straight glass. ... I felt the glass go into my hand.”
Over time, Gyllenhaal said, his “whole arm swelled up,” which was the result of a staph infection possibly suffered after cutting his hand or during another physically demanding scene.
“There were things like that that happened all the time,” he added. “But gratefully I was really, really trying to take care of everything that we did and my body while we’re doing it. I didn’t sustain any major injuries, which is a testament to the team I was working with.”
Directed by Doug Liman, Road House is a remake of the 1989 action thriller starring Patrick Swayze. Gyllenhaal portrays Elwood Dalton, a reimagined version of Swayze’s character who is a former UFC middleweight fighter.
The original Road House debuted to mostly negative reviews but, perhaps buoyed by Swayze’s star power at the time, turned out to be a surprise hit on home video.
It remains to be seen if Gyllenhaal’s version will fare better. The new film’s rollout has been hit with a number of public snags.
R. Lance Hill, who wrote the screenplay for the original Road House, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Amazon Studios last month. In it, he alleged that work on the new movie wasn’t completed until January, months after the copyright deadline had passed and he’d reclaimed the film rights.
In January, Liman announced that he would skip the movie’s South by Southwest premiere after the distributor, Amazon, opted for a direct-to-streaming release in lieu of a theatrical run.
“Amazon asked me and the film community to trust them and their public statements about supporting cinemas, and then they turned around and are using ’Road House’ to sell plumbing fixtures,” the director wrote in a Deadline essay published that month. “That hurts the filmmakers and stars of ‘Road House’ who don’t share in the upside of a hit movie on a streaming platform.”
By last week, however, Liman appeared to have changed his mind, and he turned up at the SXSW screening anyway.
Listen to Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Armchair Expert” interview below. His discussion of his on-set injury begins around 50:51.