Dev Patel Recalls Breaking Hand While Filming ‘Monkey Man’: “Everything That Could’ve Gone Wrong Went Wrong”

Dev Patel made his feature film directorial debut with Monkey Man, leaving him with some lasting memories, including his breaking his hand.

The Slumdog Millionaire made an appearance on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, where he recalled that the incident with his hand happened in the first action scene they filmed.

“Everything could have gone wrong went wrong. The first action scene I’m basically, I’m a crash test dummy that my co-star is using my face to break every piece of porcelain in this bathroom, and my hand, I heard it snap. I was like ‘This is not good,’” he said on the NBC late-night show.

He continued, “And I knew, you know, you’ve got 450 people on an island, and if I go down, the film goes down. You know, we had a purpose during a really prickly time in history. And I told my producer I was like ‘Don’t say anything. Let’s just keep filming.’ By the end of the day my hand was like an elephant’s foot. And we couldn’t afford to put a cast on and VFX it out of this movie.”

Patel recounted that because the production of the film happened during the Covid outbreak, they got a “cheap medical private jet, and we flew to Jakarta that night.” The actor said, “The doctor put a screw in my hand,” and advised him not to put more than a pound of pressure.

“Actually, I went straight back to set the next day, and was throwing myself and bouncing off a window,” Patel added. “And the crew, they made a T-shirt.”

Patel pulled out the t-shirt that had the X-ray of his hand on his sleeve with production joking, “The one screw that kept this production alive.”

Monkey Man premiered at SXSW and will hit theaters on April 5.

Watch Patel’s interview on The Tonight Show in the video below.