Elvis ‘Begged’ to Do His Own Stunts in a Film and Immediately Got Hurt

In 1964, Elvis Presley decided to try something new on the set of the film Roustabout. At this point in his career, he was already tired of his repetitive acting roles. To inject a bit of excitement into the part, Elvis asked director John Rich if he could do his own stunts. Though Rich initially refused, Elvis was persistent and the director gave in. Almost immediately, Rich came to regret this decision.

Elvis hurt himself while trying to do his own stunts in a film

On the third day of filming Roustabout, Elvis came to Rich with a proposition: he wanted to do his own stunts in a fight scene.

“He came to me and said, Could he please do the stunt himself?” Rich recalled in the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “I said, ‘My God, no. What happens if you get hurt?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to get hurt. I really know how to do this stuff. You see, I’m a black belt in karate.’ I said, ‘Well, congratulations, I think that’s wonderful, I suppose that’s good in life, but this is a movie. And God forbid you get hit in some way.’”

Elvis wouldn’t take no for an answer, though. He continued to assure Rich that he knew what he was doing and wouldn’t get hurt. Finally, Rich agreed.

“He begged. He really did,” Rich said. “And finally, he said, ‘I’ll be totally responsible for this if anything happens.’ Well, what do you do in a situation like that? I finally gave up and said okay.”

Rich immediately came to regret his decision.

“But it was a mistake, because he got clipped severely in the head, and it was like, ‘Oh, God, there goes my life in the theater,’” he said. “To tell [producer] Hal Willis that I allowed the star to do a fight. I thought, This is not going to go down well.”

Elvis felt terrible that his injury could have slowed down the film’s schedule

Rich stopped filming and sent Elvis to the hospital. Luckily, they still managed to avoid delays.

“Of course, we had to stop shooting, and I sent him off to the hospital, and he had four or five stitches in his forehead, but fortunately I had a way out,” he said. “The script called for Elvis as a motorcycle rider to be run off the road [by Leif Erickson in an early scene], and I thought, There’s no reason we can’t put a Band-Aid over Elvis’ eye. Wallis was quite pleased. He thought it was a damn good idea — as long as I could keep shooting.”

Elvis was also relieved. He felt terrible about potentially slowing down the shooting schedule and was glad to have avoided losing the studio money.

“Elvis was alright as soon as he got back,” Rich said. “He was a little subdued, having caused all this trouble — he was very apologetic. But once I told him what I’d like to do, he said, ‘Oh, that’s great because we can keep shooting.’ He was just afraid we’d have to shut down.”

People close to the singer called his karate skills into question

Perhaps Rich should have consulted Priscilla Presley before allowing Elvis to do the fight scene. According to her, Elvis wasn’t nearly as good at fighting as he thought he was. He once tried to break up a fight between two strangers, and all his friends were shocked when it didn’t go terribly.

“‘I’ll show you something, if you want to get into an argument,’ Elvis said. He shot out a karate kick, and to his surprise — and everybody else’s — he knocked a pack of cigarettes out of the guy’s pocket,” Priscilla wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “Among our group, Elvis wasn’t known for his precision in karate.”

His bodyguard, Dave Hebler, agreed with Priscilla. He sparred with Elvis on the day they met, and it was immediately clear that the singer didn’t know what he was doing.

“Now I have been in these situations a million times,” Hebler said in the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “You are usually working out with someone of similar experience to yourself, someone who knows what he is doing. Within seconds out there on the mats with Elvis it was very obvious to me that one, Elvis didn’t know half as much about karate as he thought he did; and two, he hardly knew where he was.”

Despite this, Elvis frequently put on karate demonstrations for anyone who would watch.