Kurrgan Once Punched Robert Downey Jr. In The Face Accidentally

In an interview with Stories with Briscoe and Bradshaw (via Fightful), Kurrgan spoke about filming Sherlock Holmes and remembered accidentally punching Robert Downey Jr. in the face. The two were filming a fight scene at the time.

Kurrgan said: “We were shooting a complicated scene. It was a fight scene mostly with him, and then we were shooting fight scenes underneath a boat. It was very complicated and took a few days to do it. We were changing stuff every day, the choreography of the fight. Sometimes, we never had the time to rehearse and sometimes Robert Downey was away, busy, doing something else. We had to rehearse with a stunt double. It always kept changing, all the time. We did a segment where I was aiming my punch towards his face. He was supposed to block it and then my punch was aimed towards his chest and he would fall back into barrels. We did that a couple of times on film. One time, it happened so quick, that he forgot to block. It’s tricky because I couldn’t pull back at the last minute because it happened so fast. I was aiming towards his face, he didn’t block it, so I hit him right in the mouth. I knew it was bad. I knew I hurt him. He did go down. He’s such a method actor, nobody knew on the crew whether it was part of the choreography or not. Nobody knew. He fell down, I knew I hurt him, I didn’t know how bad I hurt him. I didn’t want to break anything. He’s the leading star of the movie. I saw blood coming out of his mouth, so that was bad enough. He was dragging himself on the ground because he’s a character actor. He realized that it was real, so he stopped filming. I chased him, ‘Are you okay?’ What happened was he cut the inside of his lip. They stopped the bleeding and put some ice on it to take the swelling down. He didn’t break anything. We finished out scenes for the night and then they took him to the hospital. He got, I think, five stitches. I felt like shit. I felt terrible. You don’t want to go there and hurt people. I don’t want to kill the star. The insurance agents were on set and they were very nervous. The next day, he was fine, he came to my trailer. I was doing makeup and preparing for the next day. He came up and dropped a gift bag without saying a word. I thought he was going to attack me. It was a bottle of champagne, he wrote a personal note saying everything is cool and okay. It gave me a boost.I was (more upset than he was). I felt bad. In the end, it gave me a bit more publicity. It went viral because it said, ‘An extra hits Iron Man.’ I wasn’t an extra in that movie. It kind of insulted me a bit. Stuntman is fine. I was kind of a stunt actor, I did my own stunts. It went viral enough that I did a lot of publicity for it. I was even mentioned on David Letterman when Downey was on the show promoting the movie. He told the story, and it was good publicity. It’s going to be on my tombstone or something [laughs], which is fine. Everybody survived and Robert Downey did another $15 million and he’s okay.“