Olive Wilde vulnerably opened up about how she was nearly killed in a horse stampede before Walton Goggins saved her on the set of the 2011 western film “Cowboys & Aliens.”
“I had a very bad horse accident, and he saved me,” the actress shared on Monday’s episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“I’ve ridden horses my whole life. I have a lot of confidence with riding a certain style, like English style, but this was Western, different.”
Wilde, 42, explained she was two months into working on the film with Goggins, alongside co-stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, admitting they had “gotten really cocky” with riding.
“And we were pretty competitive,” she said. “And it was me and Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford galloping like full sprint across the desert with like 40 horses behind us.”
“We were leading the charge to fight the aliens,” the “Don’t Worry Darling” star continued. “We got to a part where I could see ahead of us that there was a large ditch, like a 6-foot ditch, and I was like, ‘This horse is going to jump that ditch.’”
Wilde reflected on riding a Western saddle with no helmet when the accident occurred, adding, “Sure enough, this horse jumps and bucks me off in the craziest way, and I fell off.”
“I hit my head and my back,” she said. “I was on the other side of this kind of like lip of dirt, so meaning that the 40 horses behind me couldn’t see me. And there was a lot of dust. I remember my ear to the group, and I could hear it, and it sounded like thunder.”
Recalling the incident, the director recalled thinking that her death would be “quick.”
“It’ll be like pulverized applesauce out,” she thought at the time. “And I was waiting for it to happen. And then Wal Goggins had seen it 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.”
“And he’s a great rider, so he was able to handle that,” Wilde continued. “And people split the two sides around us thinking he had just like gone insane, but he was protecting my body on the ground.”
The “Tron: Legacy” star concluded, “So I owe him my life. It’s crazy. He’s a real-life hero.”
Wilde played Ella Swenson and Goggins portrayed Hunt in the Jon Favreau-directed movie.
Elsewhere in the interview, Wilde gushed over her co-star Paul Dano, whom she described as the “nicest person” when she worked as a casting intern long before filming “Cowboys & Aliens.”
“Everyone else treated me like low-level staff except Paul Dano, the nicest person in the world,” she said. “Then being able to work with him on ‘Cowboys & Aliens,’ we just had the best time.”
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