When most audiences sit down to watch a movie or TV show, they want to invest in whatever media they are about to take in. With that in mind, it makes sense that one of the biggest things that filmmakers try to accomplish is getting viewers to suspend their disbelief. Of course, the reason why that is necessary is that viewers know that the vast majority of the things they see on the big and little screen are faked to entertain them.
Unfortunately, there are far too many examples of instances in which things became far too real on movie and television sets. In the absolute worst cases, people have lost their lives while working on film and television sets. Sadly, several actors have also been severely injured during the filming process which is almost as tragic. For example, most Dylan O’Brien fans will already know that the famous actor once was the victim of an extremely horrific accident. However, many of those same fans are completely unaware of how much those tragic events affected O’Brien’s life.
Dylan O’Brien’s Tragic Accident
Once Twilight came out and made a fortune at the box office in 2008, all of the major studios rushed to put films based on young adult novels into production. Following the success of other young adult films like the Hunger Games series, the trend continued to pick up steam. That led to Dylan O’Brien being hired to play the lead in 2014’s The Maze Runner, a movie that is based on a successful young adult novel.
Following The Maze Runner’s success at the box office, the film would go on to be followed by a pair of sequels. It was during the production of the third Maze Runner movie that things suddenly went horribly awry. In order to shoot a scene in which his character could be seen on top of a moving vehicle, O’Brien was strapped to it. Unfortunately for him, O’Brien wasn’t strapped in properly which resulted in him being thrown from his perch and hit by another moving vehicle.
When news of Dylan O’Brien’s accident initially hit the press, the extent of his injuries were severely understated. Soon thereafter, however, O’Brien’s fans learned that Dylan was so badly injured that production of the third Maze Runner film was shut down indefinitely. During an interview that took place more than a year after his accident, Dylan O’Brien described the extent of his injuries so vividly that it is bound to make most people cringe. After all, O’Brien explained that the accident “broke most of the right side of [his] face” and that he suffered severe trauma to his brain.
Dylan O’Brien’s Recovery And Reflections
Given the extent of Dylan O’Brien’s injuries following the accident on the set of Maze Runner: The Death Cure, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the actor took months to recover. In fact, it took roughly a year for O’Brien to become healthy enough to resume filming the third Maze Runner film. O’Brien would also go on to make several more films and appear in episodes of some notable shows in the years that followed. However, that doesn’t mean that O’Brien walked away from his accident unchanged.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan O’Brien has been asked about recovering from his accident over and over again and the actor has been very open about how deeply it affected him. For example, during a 2020 appearance on Variety’s The Big Ticket with Marc Malkin, O’Brien talked about being much more careful about his own safety he’d become. “Whenever I’m putting on a rig, I’m vetting every piece of that rig and much more. Even to this day, if I’m on set and I’m doing a stunt, if I’m in a rig, if there’s some action going on, I am slightly irritable. There is a degree of anxiety in me that I don’t think there’s ever not going to be.”
Later during that same appearance, Dylan O’Brien made it clear that his perspective on life changed in some positive ways following his accident. “I had friends that were so dear to me that I had felt that I had neglected for years. All of a sudden, it was very important to me to nurture those relationships and not lose them. I think that it absolutely completely rewires and restructures the way you see your life and what you deem important.”
Sadly, when he was interviewed by Teen Vogue in 2017, it was abundantly clear that Dylan O'Brien's recovery from his accident involved dealing with serious emotional trauma. Thankfully, O’Brien had a supportive figure in his life who helped him to cope. “Sometimes I’d literally show up at the gym having a panic attack, and my trainer would be like, ‘All right, let’s just go get breakfast. I can’t give enough credit to him … he was really there for me, and not just like a trainer where it’s like, ‘Well, come on, man, I gotta pump you up.’ He cared more about my mind and the state that I was in.”