Olivia Wilde divulged that she might not be around today if it weren’t for one of her former co-stars.
Wilde, 42, told host Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast that her Cowboys & Aliens castmate Walton Goggins prevented her from being stampeded to death by horses while they were shooting the film.
“Walt Goggins saved my life on that movie,” the Don’t Worry Darling actress said in an episode published on Monday. “I had a very bad horse accident and he saved me.”
Wilde explained that, despite her background in English horseback riding, she and the rest of the cast had become “cocky” about western-style riding after working on the film for two months.
“It was me and Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford galloping like full, full, full sprint across the desert with like 40 horses behind us, and we were like, leading the charge to fight the aliens or whatever,” she continued.
The Booksmart actress said her horse eventually came across a “large ditch,” which caused her to be thrown off her mount.
“So, sure enough, this horse jumps and bucks me off in the craziest way, and I fell off. I hit my head and my back, and I was laying [on the ground] but, unfortunately, I was on the other side of this kind of lip of dirt, meaning that all horses behind couldn’t see me,” she described. “And there was also a lot of dust. I remember having my ear to the ground and I could hear it and it sounded like thunder, like they were coming towards me. And I had the thought — it sounds so dramatic — but I thought, it’ll be quick. It’ll be like, pulverized applesauce. Out.”
Wilde added that Goggins, 54, had noticed her fall and turned his horse on a dime in front of her to protect her from the other horses.
“Walt Goggins had seen [me] ahead of him and in a split second thought to turn his horse sideways right in front of me and let everyone kind of bash into him,” she explained. “And he’s a great rider, so he was able to handle that. People split the two sides around us thinking he had just gone insane, but he was protecting my body on the ground.”
“And so I owe him my life. It’s crazy,” Wilde said. “He’s a real-life hero.”
Directed by Jon Favreau, Cowboys & Aliens pulled in a disappointing $175 million on a $163 million budget.
Goggins, perhaps best known for his role as Rick Hatchett in season three of HBO’s The White Lotus, also plays a gunslinging zombie cowboy in Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout series.
