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Olivia Wilde Says Walton Goggins Saved Her From Near-Death Experience

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Olivia Wilde would actually be out of this world if not for Walton Goggins.

The Invite director recently reflected on a near-death experience she had on the set of the 2011 movie Cowboys & Aliens while filming a battle scene alongside Goggins.

“I had a very bad horse accident,” Wilde, who played cowboy-turned-alien Ella Swenson in the film, detailed during a June 29 appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert, “and he saved me.”

Indeed, while the 42-year-old noted she had plenty of familiarity with horses by the time she got to set, she wasn’t used to the style or cadence of riding the film required—especially on the day of the incident.

“We were pretty cocky with it and we were pretty competitive,” she recalled. “It was me, Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford galloping like full, full sprint across the desert with like, 40 horses behind us.”

In the middle of the scene however, Wilde’s horse attempted to jump over a 6-foot ditch and the Booksmart director realized, “I’m on this Western saddle—no helmet because I’m playing an old timey lady.”

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Olivia Wilde Reacts to Rumors of Screaming Match With Florence Pugh on Don’t Worry Darling Set

“This horse jumps and bucks me off in the craziest way,” Wilde recalled, “and I fell off and I hit my head and my back and I was laying and I was on this other side of this kind of lip of dirt, meaning that the 40 horses behind me couldn’t see me.”

At that point, Wilde admitted she was preparing for the worst.

“I had my ear to the ground and it sounded like thunder,” she detailed, “Like they were coming toward me and I had the thought, it sounds dramatic, but I thought, ‘It’ll be quick. It’ll be like pulverized apple sauce—out.’”

Ian West/PA Images via Getty Images/Brianna Bryson/WireImage

To her surprise, though, the White Lotus a lum was quick on his feet—or rather, his horse.

“In a split second, [he turned] his horse sideways right in front of me and let everyone kind of bash into him,” Wilde shared. “He’s a great rider so he was able to handle that and people split the two sides around us—thinking he had just gone insane but he was protecting my body on the ground.”

Reflecting on the moment, she emphasized of the now-54-year-old, “I owe him my life—he’s a real life hero.”

For more famous freak accidents, keep reading…

Jamie Lynn Spears/Instagram

Maddie AldridgeJamie Lynn Spears‘ then-8-year-old daughter Maddie Aldridge was driving an ATV in February 2017 when she accidentally flipped it into a pond near their Louisiana home, leaving her submerged under water for minutes. “When we were finally able to get her out of the water and I saw her and then the first responders took her from me, we thought she was gone,” Jamie Lynn recalled on a 2020 episode of Maria Menounos Better Together podcast. “We thought we’d lost our daughter.”Though the family wasn’t sure what sort of damage had been done, Maddie was awake and talking two days later. A few weeks after that, she was back to her normal routine. “God gave me the blessing of giving me my daughter back,” Jamie Lynn continued. “I lost her and I got her back.”

Magenta Light Studios

Rebel WilsonFilming on Rebel Wilson and Anna Camp‘s 2025 action comedy Bride Hard turned dramatic during the Aussie’s final day of playing secret agent. “In a fight scene, a gun accidentally got whacked across my face,” Rebel explained to Access Hollywood in a June 2025 interview. “It was just a freak accident, and my nose got split open, so I left set. It was my last night of shooting. I was like, ‘How unlucky can I be?'”Surrounded by a pool of her own blood, “I was freaking out,” she admitted of the 2023 incident. “They take an ambulance and they have to call a plastic surgeon, because if they didn’t, I would have been permanently disfigured. So we got the plastic surgeon, they did all the stitches, and you can’t tell now.”

Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

Jimmy FallonTonight Show host Jimmy Fallon almost lost his finger after he tripped and fell in his own home. He tried catching himself on the counter and his ring got stuck on the way down, pulling his finger out.He described it as “ring avulsion,” and it kept him in the hospital for 10 days as doctors worked to prevent him from having to get it amputated.

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Zane WachAn experienced hiker who competes in distance running, swimming and triathlons, Zane Wach was nearly felled by altitude sickness while hiking with his dad Ryan Wach on California’s Mount Whitney in June 2025. “He started to experience some hallucinations,” Ryan explained to to the SFGATE of the 14-year-old. “He knew he was hallucinating. He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog.”Ryan managed to stop his teen from walking off the cliff multiple times as they made their way back down the trail. “He was in an altered mental state, and I don’t know what caused it. We still don’t know,” the father noted. “My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.” And on a third attempt, Ryan was too far away to catch Zane, watching as his son fell roughly 120 feet off the cliff. After waiting six hours for an Inyo County Search & Rescue helicopter to get there and fly Zane to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, he was stabilized and transferred to a pediatric trauma center in Las Vegas. Placed into a medically induced coma, he eventually began breathing on his own. “It’s going to be a survival story in the end,” Ryan said of his teen, who suffered head trauma along with a broken finger, ankle and fractured pelvis, “but right now we’re still in the middle of it.”

Todd Williamson/NBC

Jeremy RennerOn New Years’ Day 2023, Avengers star Jeremy Renner was using a snowplow to tow a truck that was stuck in the snow on the driveway of his Lake Tahoe home. But after exiting the machine, he was pulled under while trying to stop the plow from hitting his nephew and suffered 38 broken bones.”As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired,” he wrote in his 2025 memoir My Next Breath. “After about thirty minutes on the ice of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing ten or twenty push-ups per minute for half an hour . . . that’s when I died.” Fighting broken bones, blood loss and the threat of hypothermia, “I know I died—in fact, I’m sure of it,” he wrote. “When the EMTs arrived, they noted that my heart rate had bottomed out at 18, and at 18 beats per minute, you’re basically dead.”

Emilie Kiser/Instagram

Trigg KiserTikToker Emilie Kiser and her husband Brady Kiser were forced to face the unimaginable when their 3-year-old son Trigg Kiser fell into the pool at their Arizona home in May 2025. Chandler Police Department told USA Today that officers responded to a drowning call at a residence on May 12, for a child who had been pulled unconscious out of a backyard pool. Both police and firefighters administered CPR on the scene, before taking Trigg to Chandler Regional Hospital. But, sadly, the toddler died six days later. Emilie later filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County public offices requesting that the court prohibit the public release of details surrounding his death. “Emilie is trying her best to be there for her surviving son, two-month-old Theodore,” the lawsuit stated. “But every day is a battle.”

Cara Hodgson/Instagram

Cara HodgsonA family vacation to Thailand turned into “the worst 10 days” of Dr. Cara Hodgson‘s life after she was electrocuted by power lines in December 2023. After blacking out and being rushed to the ER, the influencer spent the next week and a half “going in and out of hospitals fighting to regain my strength and fighting for my life,” she detailed in a New Year’s Day Instagram post. “I am so lucky to be here today.”As such, the orthodonist found a new reason to smile through the pain. The experience “taught me something I think we all need to be reminded of when we get caught up in the little things: What a precious privilege it is to be alive,” Cara shared, “being able to breathe, eat, talk, move your body, is something grand and something to be celebrated.”

Juliana Marins / Instagram

Juliana MarinsTragedy occured when Brazilian tourist Juliana Marins was hiking on Mount Rinjani, an active volcano in Indonesia, in June 2025. After she fell off a cliff (but not into the volcano’s crater), a team of 48 search and rescuers spent four days “hindered by adverse weather, terrain and visibility conditions in the region,” the Brazilian government shared in a statement, and eventually located Juliana’s body. “Today, the rescue team managed to reach the place where Juliana Marins was,” detailed a post on an Instagram account providing updates from her family. “With great sadness, we inform you that she did not survive. We remain very grateful for all the prayers, messages of affection and support that we have received.”

Andrew J Cunningham/Getty Images

Tori SpellingWhen former Beverly Hills, 90210 star Tori Spelling attended a 2015 Easter brunch at Japanese restaurant Benihana, she tripped and burned her right arm on one of the Hibachi grills. After undergoing skin grafts to treat the injury, the actress ultimately deciding to sue the restaurant.“I have a skin graft that they had to take from my leg,” she later detailed on a 2024 episode of her and Jennie Garth‘s podcast 9021OMG. “Not many people can say, ‘Hey, I’m wearing my thigh on my arm,’ and I’m not even kidding. So I’m wearing a thin layer of my thigh on my arm because the skin burnt so bad.”

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Tony KnightWhen comedian Tony Knight attended France’s Rock&Cars festival in June 2024, he was killed after two large branches fell from a tree. “He was only 54 and having the time of his life,” Joanne Allen, the sister of Tony’s longtime partner Hayley Wright detailed in a GoFundMe message. “He was fit, healthy, happy and had everything going for him. He was charismatic, funny, passionate.”And, of course, adored by his longtime love. “He was an exceptionally talented man, with so many strings to his bow,” Haley wrote in her own Instagram post. “There really was nothing he couldn’t do. He was a fantastic friend to so many, an amazing dog Dad….but most of all he was my world & it will never be the same without him.”

Barry Brecheisen/Invision/AP

Sanjay ShahA company celebration turned catastrophic in January 2024. To kickoff the planned 25th anniversary festivities for Chicago-based software company Vistex, CEO Sanjay Shah and president Vishwanath Raju Datla were suspended in an iron cage meant to be lowered 20 feet onto a dais at the India-based party, a company official told The Times of India. Instead, two wires snapped, causing the men to crash onto the concrete stage. Sanjay, 56, died of his injuries at the hospital following the accident, the paper reported, while 52-year-old Vishwanath sustained a severe head injury and passed months later.

SBM/Plux/Shutterstock

Orlando Bloom”When I was 19 I fell three floors from a window and broke my back,” Orlando Bloom shared in a joint 2022 Instagram video with UNICEF. He had been trying to climb to the rooftop terrace of a three-story building with friends when the drainpipe he was scaling collapsed. Though he broke several vertebrae in his back, “I was very fortunate to survive the fall because my spinal cord was still just intact.” Still, he detailed, “When I was in the hospital, I was told for the first four days that I may never walk again. That was really the beginning of what was a long and painful journey for me into recognizing and understanding some of the patterns that had been in my life that had led me to having numerous accidents. And the culmination was breaking my back, which was a near-death experience.”Leaving the hospital in a back brace with heaps of physical and emotional pain, “I started partying straight away—with the back brace on,” he shared with GQ in 2005. “It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn’t want to mess it up.” The experience has “informed everything in my life,” he added. “Until you’re close to losing it, you don’t realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn’t because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I’ve chilled.”

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