Ewan McGregor Once Nearly Broke His Hand Acting With Former ‘Mandalorian’ Star Gina Carano
Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor and Gina Carano once worked together before they were a part of the same franchise. As some may know, Carano and McGregor collaborated on the 2011 spy thriller Haywire, where Carano portrayed a secret agent. At one point McGregor accidentally struck Carano while filming a scene. But it did more damage to McGregor than Carano.
Gina Carano was cast in ‘Haywire’ because of her MMA background
Carano had a prolific career as an MMA fighter before she transitioned over to Hollywood. Her first leading role was in the 2011 film Haywire, in which Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh cast her. Carano once explained that it was her last MMA fight with Cris Cyborg that caught Soderbergh’s attention. Even though she’d lost the match, she left enough of an impression on the Oscar-nominated filmmaker to star in his spy thriller.
“After I lost my fight to Cyborg he came out on a train from LA to San Diego and had a little lunch with me,” she once told Den of Geek. “We had talked and then at the end of the lunch he was like ‘look, I wanna do a film with you. There’s no actors and there’s no script, there’s no studio attached to it, I just wanted to meet with you and see if you’d be interested in anything like that’ and I was just like…I said ‘yes!’”
The ex-Mandalorian star admitted she didn’t know who the director was at the time, but she knew his films.
“Yeah, I was with his films, I just didn’t know who he was. Really I didn’t know what it was that was involved with making films. I didn’t know that the director is the guy with the vision. I just never thought about it, I guess. But it was definitely a Film 101 school for me, all of Haywire,” she said.
Ewan McGregor once punched Gina Carano in ‘Haywire’
Haywire was rounded out by a cast that consisted of Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender and Bill Paxton. McGregor in particular ended up doing a very physical scene with Carano that resulted in him accidentally striking the former fighter.
“The only time I got hurt was when I punched Gina Carano in the head by accident,” McGregor once told E-News.
But the Trainspotting actor revealed that he hurt himself more than he did his co-star.
“I had a series of three punches, but the third one…for one reason or another I connected really hard on the side of her head,” he continued. “She was the one who got straight up and said, ‘Are you OK?’ She was asking me if I was OK! But she was right because I almost broke my friggin’ hand!”
Meanwhile, McGregor informed that Carano was “absolutely fine.”
A secret agent followed Gina Carano around to prepare her for ‘Haywire’
Carano may have already had the physical requirements Soderbergh was looking for in his Haywire star. But he still went the extra mile to make sure Carano was psychologically prepared for the role. To do this, The Informant filmmaker had a real-life secret agent follow Carano around, and even considered kidnapping her.
“Like method acting… They put me with an ex-Mossad, that’s like a solider and he’d never done a movie either. So he’s all excited, putting me through this training. So he puts a Gps (Global Positioning System) on my car and jumps me outside a hair salon,” Carano once said according to Contact Music. “He wanted to kidnap me but Steven Soderbergh said that would have been a little excessive. Is this how movies are made? I’m quite paranoid now.”
