Jack Quaid is making waves in Hollywood these days. Be it his stellar performance in movies like Oppenheimer, Companion, Scream, or blockbuster series like The Boys, the 33-year-old actor has been the talk of the town recently.
His new movie, Novocaine, too, has only added to his magnificent repertoire due to the mastery he has shown over his acting skills, even while presented with such a unique premise. Interestingly though, this wasn’t the first time the actor had to get bloody for his role in a movie.
While Novocaine and even The Boys had plenty of sequences where Jack Quaid looked battered on camera, his first movie, The Hunger Games, with Jennifer Lawrence, left him with an injury that even the heavy special effects couldn’t hide it from fans.
Jack Quaid injured himself while preparing for The Hunger Games
While Jack Quaid definitely remained shrouded in relative obscurity and small roles until becoming Hughie Campbell for The Boys, it is also true that not every celebrity can boast of debuting in a big-budget movie like The Hunger Games.
However, that’s exactly what happened when Quaid got the role of Marvel in the 2012 Jennifer Lawrence starrer. As such, it is not really impossible to imagine his enthusiasm for it. However, that enthusiasm was what landed him in serious trouble when he broke his nose while preparing for the role.
Quaid stated the same during his interview with IGN back in February 2025 while promoting his movie Novocaine with Marvel star Jacob Batalon. According to him, the accident occurred just the day before he started shooting for The Hunger Games. As such, his crooked nose made a full appearance in the movie.
Right before my very first day shooting on The Hunger Games, I’m 19, it’s my first movie…One of the exercises was, I would have a medicine ball, and I would slam it onto the ground, pick it up, and slam it again. I’m in the gym for the first time by myself, no trainer. I take the medicine ball, I slam it, it bounces up, hits me right in the face, and uh, my nose starts…I fall down, my nose starts bleeding. My nose has never looked the same. It looked a different way before this incident.
What perplexed him even in that situation was the fact that the medicine ball bounced in the first place. For people who don’t know, medicine balls are weighted balls usually utilized for different exercises. However, unlike other balls, due to its heavy weight they don’t usually bounce up once slammed.
As such, his surprise at the turn of events is more than justified. Especially as Batalon, too, agreed with him, saying, “They’re not supposed to bounce.“ Quaid also exclaimed his surprise by jokingly adding,
Yeah! I know they- like, ‘Come on! Why are you bouncing?’ You know, because you’re getting low…
He further added that if someone looks really closely at him during a specific scene from the movie, they could see just how “swollen” his nose was at the time. The interviewer also expressed her sympathy about the incident. However, Jack Quaid’s on-set health scares reportedly still continue to this day, even if in the form of pranks.
Jack Quaid’s on-set health scares have become frequent
For context, Novocaine depicted Jack Quaid as a character who does not feel pain. So, when the girl of his dreams gets kidnapped, he goes after the goons holding her to save her. Now, even though it satisfies a mass common man fantasy of becoming a savior, the path to it obviously is paved with bloodshed.
As an ordinary office employee, he obviously struggles to keep up with the thugs, but his special condition provides him with an edge in the fight. However, getting bloody and battered was inevitable.
Interestingly, he capitalized on that aspect of his shooting and used it to prank his loved ones. Quaid admitted during his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live before the movie’s release,
What I would do, almost every day, was just Facetime people in LA with absolutely no context…Just calling my girlfriend and her being like, ‘Hey, how’s it going? OH MY GOD!’, or like calling all of my friends and just being like, ‘Had a bit of a whoopsie!’.
Now, with his track record of getting hurt on movie sets, his family and friends obviously felt scared. However, with the frequency Jack Quaid claimed to have done, they probably got used to it by the time filming wrapped up.
The Hunger Games is currently streaming on Apple TV.
