‘Extraction 2’ Director Reveals an Actor Broke Her Leg in Epic One-Shot Scene: “She Kept Going”

You can expect bigger and better action in Extraction 2, which is coming to Netflix this Friday, but not all of the Extraction cast made it out of that action unscathed. In an interview with Decider, director Sam Hargrave revealed that Georgian actress Tinatin Dalakishvili, who plays the character named Ketevan, broke her leg while filming one of the movie’s marquee action set pieces in a prison yard.

Hargrave, writer Joe Russo, and star Chris Hemsworth went above and beyond to raise the stakes in this sequel to the 2020 film, including a jaw-dropping 21-minute continuous action sequence, which is filmed to look like it was done in one take. (In reality, there are dozens of hidden cuts, or “stitches,” but it’s still very difficult to pull off.) Though it was originally meant to be filmed in Australia, renewed COVID protocols forced the production to relocate to Prague. As a result, the sequence was split into three locations, the first of which takes place in a prison yard.

In the prison yard scene, Hemsworth’s character is attempting to spring Dalakishvili’s character, Ketevan, from the prison where she and her children are being held by her abusive, mob boss husband. A prison riot breaks out, and Hemsworth is forced to fight his way across the riot, with Dalakishvili in tow. The scene required over 400 stunt performers and “special ability action extras,” some of whom were fighting Hemsworth, and some of whom were fighting each other. During this chaotic scene, Hargrave said, Dalakishvili fell and broke her leg.

“It was one of those unfortunate things, when you’ve got that many moving parts and things going on,” Hargrave told Decider. “During the course of one of those sequences, she fractured her lower leg. I think she fell down wrong on her leg, or one of the stunt performers might have stepped back and stepped on her. We’re not exactly sure when [the fracture happened].”

Not even the 32-year-old Georgian actress realized what had happened, at first, and indeed, kept filming her scene. “She kept going,” Hargrave explained. “She was like, ‘Oh, my leg is a little bit sore.’ We were like, ‘Are you sure? Are you OK?’ She was like, ‘Yeah.’ She kept going! She kept performing because she was so excited to be there and do it.”

At the end of the night, the pain didn’t subside, so Dalakishvili was sent away to get an X-Ray, and discovered a hairline fracture in her leg. She was put in a cast. “That was early on, and we had a lot of other scenes to film,” Hargrave said. “So special effects made her, basically a wooden—well, it was made out of aluminum or alloy—but a peg leg, so that she could walk. We had to then adjust our framing, because we couldn’t look down and see that she’s missing a leg. Her gait was a bit off, so we had change a lot of the blocking, which was very challenging.”

In an interview for the Extraction 2 press notes, producer Patrick Newall applauded Dalakishvili for finishing the shoot, despite her injury. “Tinatin kept shooting and worked through the scene for multiple long and cold nights standing and walking with the prosthetic,” Newall said. “She was a real trooper in her tenacity and determination to keep working with a broken leg… in the middle of a massive stunt sequence. There’s no one tougher.”