Last September, actress Jaime King posted a photo of herself on Instagram with a bandaged left wrist and her thumb in a splint.
“Thumbs up!” wrote King. “Finally released from the hospital after 3 nights. Lots of broken and torn things.”
The actress hurt herself while shooting Black Summer, the just-released new zombie show from Netflix. How exactly did the injury occur?
“I always say, we really only have between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut,’” King tells EW. “It’s like, all the preparation, all of the work, everything is in that moment. That is where the truth lives. You have to be so prepared that everything just disappears. One thing that kept happening to me on Black Summer, when the director would say ‘Action,’ I was just so in it, that when he said ‘Cut,’ I would be like, ‘Uh….’ I literally could not remember what I did. And that’s when you know you’re not acting, you know what I mean? You’re just doing, you’re just being, you’re just in it. When I got injured, we had rehearsed this scene, it’s a finale scene, and I have to do something that I’ve never done before, and when they said ‘Action,’ and I did this action, I was so shaken by it that I like ran three steps back. They had put a body behind me that they didn’t put in rehearsal. The next thing I know, I’m knocked out, and seriously, seriously injured. But of course I get back up and I’m like, ‘Just roll cameras, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. We’ve gotta shoot, we’ve gotta shoot’. Then my costar turned to me and he was like, ‘Don’t be a f—ing hero.’ It was pretty intense.”
In Black Summer, King plays a woman named Rose who is separated from her daughter in the chaos that ensues after the dead start to walk.
“She is a Midwestern woman who is in love with her husband and has been with him for a long time, and loves her daughter, and finds herself in these extraordinary circumstances,” says King, whose previous acting credits include the Sin City films and The CW show Hart of Dixie. “Her child is ripped from her, torn away from her, and [she] will stop at nothing to go get her.”
Watch the trailer for Black Summer, above.
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