Movie and TV productions have countless little tricks to make fake violence look real, but they don’t always work out smoothly. Alan Ritchson, star of the hit Prime Video series “Reacher,” learned this the hard way when filming a fight scene in season 1. As he explained in a January 2024 interview, he was seriously injured during the production of the episode “Reacher Said Nothing,” when an evil henchman smashes a prop vase on his character’s head.
“That fight took so much out of me!” Ritchson said. “I had a beanie on and when I got cracked in the head with a vase … Look, it was a sugar vase and I said to the guy to just f***ing rock me with that thing, man. It looked really cool. It shatters and I’m like … I feel it. I am dazed. We finish the sequence and I take my beanie off and there is blood everywhere.” You can actually see the moment where Ritchson’s injured in the actual episode, although his blood thankfully stays underneath the hoodie for the whole scene:
The reason Ritchson was so surprised that the vase would hurt him was because it was a sugar vase; that means instead of real glass, it was made out of a mix of sugar, corn syrup, and water. It’s a lot less sharp than real glass, but there are countless stories of actors and stunt doubles falsely believing it can’t harm them.
“I told the stunt guys and was like, ‘Dude, that was a sugar vase?'” Ritchson recalled. “And they go, ‘Oh yeah, the sugar vase doesn’t help at all.'”
Sugar glass: Not safe, but safe-ish
Long before Ritchson was injured from sugar glass, “Alien” star Sigourney Weaver was once left “covered in blood” after filming a scene for the 1986 film “Aliens.” Weaver explained in a TV appearance how, during the scene where her character Ripley saves the young Newt from the alien nest, Weaver was supposed to rummage her hands through a bunch of sugar glass, or “candy glass” as they called it.
“[Director] Jim [Cameron] is saying, ‘You run in, you tear this apart, it’s all candy glass, it’s not real glass, it’s fine, it’s safe,'” Weaver recalled. Cameron had rummaged his own hands through the glass to prove his point, and his hands emerged unscathed. When Weaver did the same thing for the scene, however…
“I run in, like that,” Weaver said, miming the scene, “Grab the girl. Run out. I look down, and I’m covered with blood. Because, you know, I guess I’m not as butch as [Cameron].” The moral of her story, as her interviewer John Mulaney put it, is that James Cameron “has no blood.” Or perhaps he just has unusually tough skin on his hands.
Despite all the stories of sugar/candy glass cutting through actors’ and stunt doubles’ skin, it’s still a common movie prop because it’s safer than real glass and it looks convincing. Part of what makes the fight scenes on “Reacher” so compelling is that they’re done as practically as possible. The cast and crew understand that the Ritchson getting hit with an actual vase (albeit, a sugar glass one) will hit much harder with audiences than trying to do it with CGI. The production of every good action movie involves a balancing act between keeping the actors safe while keeping things feeling real, but Ritchson is even more willing to keep it real than most. His many, many other injury stories from “Reacher” make that clear.
