“Hey, kid, you wanna try one where he hits you for real?”
In The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s one scene where Donnie gets knocked out by Jon Bernthal’s character Brad.
They’d done a few takes, and Scorsese wasn’t happy with the way it looked. He turns to Jonah Hill and says, “Hey, kid, you wanna try one where he hits you for real?”.
Now imagine being Jonah Hill in this situation, you’re an up-and-coming actor in Hollywood, working with your creative idol, Martin Scorsese, and Leonardo DiCaprio. He was hardly going to say no.
So they go out to do the take where he gets hit for real. He’s shitting himself the whole time — naturally.
Jon Bernthal punched him on the side of the mouth, knocking him over, splitting his prosthetic teeth, putting him in a daze.
As he’s coming to his senses on the floor, he hears Scorsese shout, “his face is swelling, get him some new teeth and let’s shoot it.”
So that’s what you see in the movie, Jonah Hill on the floor, with some new fake teeth and a swollen face.
Most of the time, actors don’t get punched for real. The reasons are obvious. But sometimes, things happen accidentally, and sometimes, it’s the price you pay to make a good movie. This particular scene is iconic and immortalised. Jonah Hill’s face is neither, and made a full recovery regardless.