How the hell is Gerard Butler still alive?

It’s part of the mythos of Hollywood action stars that they’re not afraid to do their own stunts, risk their necks, and just generally court danger in order to maintain their larger-than life mystique. Even on that scale, though, the stories Gerard Butler told during a recent conversation with his Den Of Thieves 2 star O’Shea Jackson Jr. sound extreme, to the point that they had us genuinely asking: How the hell is Gerard Butler still alive?

Butler was chatting with Jackson for People, when the topic of their respective action careers came up. (Jackson jokingly acknowledged that Butler’s resumé is just a bit more developed than his is at this point.) Butler, in his charming way, was quickly off to the races, describing incidents on the sets of Chasing Mavericks (almost drowned, “give me the defibrilator”), Butterfly On A Wheel (Pierce Brosnan drove them both into a wall, “full-speed, destroyed my neck”), and, of course, 300, where “every day somebody was getting taken to the hospital. You’d be doing a fight, you turn around, there’s a guy down there, a spear went in his eye.” (It’s worth watching the interview just to see Jackson’s wordless reactions to some of this stuff.)

That’s to say nothing of the potential danger Butler has posed to others! The story of him scarring Hilary Swank on the set of P.S. I Love You has been reported before—he was dancing around in his boxer shorts for a scene, and a suspender clip he was supposed to harmlessly fire off into the distance went the wrong way and slashed her forehead. But also: “Almost shot Angelina Jolie in the face,” he cheerfully tells Jackson, recounting a story from Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life where he was apparently supposed to fire a weapon while dropping on a rope. “I was upside down, I had to fire a gun, but I had no control over this thing went, so I was just firing, and I just missed her.” (We have to assume there is more context to this story somewhere, possibly the words “it was loaded with blanks, of course”; director Jan de Bont has made enough action movies that we’d assume he’d have more sense than to execute a literal version of what Butler is describing.)

Butler continues: “I’ve been shot by bullets, casings, explosions. A whole camera rig once fell on Hilary Swank and *attempts to mime trying to keep it from crushing her*.” Credit to Jackson, who doesn’t miss a beat with the punchline to the entire charming diatribe, tying the whole thing back to his own “action” career: “Yeah… Bluescreen is crazy.” Anyway, Gerard Butler: Still alive, but not for trying.