Idris Elba says he’d believed that he’d actually been shot during the last scenes he filmed for American Gangster.
In the movie, his character, Tango, who tries to short drug trafficker Frank Lucas on his money. Frank pulls a gun to his head and Tango goads him to shoot him in the middle of the street— and Frank does.
“What happened was, I said to Idris ‘Listen, when he puts the gun to your head lean on the gun’–because by the way this is a gun with a solid barrel, there is no aperture. I would never risk it–but when you pull the trigger there’s a recoil, there’s no blank, nothing,” he said.
“He pulled the trigger and it goes ‘Bang!’ Idris thought he’d been shot and dropped to the sidewalk and said ‘I’ve been shot!'”
After Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a crew member, sets may not be using real guns for movies for much longer.
