Who doesn’t enjoy a good action or horror movie every now and then? The thrill of watching your favorite actress stab the villain through the abdomen or that crazy scene where the good guy fights their way out of the coffin they’ve been buried alive may be entertaining. However, there are many questions left unanswered about the physical injuries that an actor would have in real life. Dr. Italo Brown, M.D., M.P.H., sat down with GQ’s “The Breakdown” to give us a physician’s perspective on what possible medical injuries Hollywood actors and actresses could face if the movie scenes were real.
Sacramento native, Dr. Brown is an emergency medicine physician and currently completing a fellowship at the Stanford Department of Emergency Medicine. His GQ installment went viral and gained 3 million views and counting. In the GQ episode, Dr. Brown breaks down scenes from Jordan Peele’s horror film “Us,” “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” and more.
For the movie “Us,” Dr. Brown explains how the stab wound to the dorsum of Adelaide’s hand, would not only prevent her from making a fist due to possible severed tendons, but the volume of blood produced by severed arteries would be significantly apparent, neither of which was portrayed in the scene.
Dr. Brown also breaks down the scene in “Kill Bill Vol. 2” where Uma Thurman punches her way out of a coffin she’s been buried alive in. If this scene were real and Thurman wasn’t a trained fighting machine, she would have most likely suffered a fracture to her fourth and fifth fingers.
When Dr. Brown’s GQ episode went viral, he was pleased to receive such positive feedback in the comment section.
“At first, I didn’t read the comments. I was sure there’d be someone racially profiling, saying, ‘He’s not a doctor,'” he told Scope.
As an African American physician with locs, Dr. Brown is a part of only two percent of emergency medicine physicians that look like him. He explained to Scope that his natural hairstyle does not affect his ability to provide excellent patient care. In fact, it helps his physician-patient relationship by making him connect better with his patients.
Social emergency medicine is a field that Dr. Brown is passionate about as it combines public health and emergency medicine. An example of how Dr. Brown marries the two can be found in his latest visit to an Alabama barbershop where he uses the traditional cultural safe space to talk to Black men about their health.
We see you, Dr. Brown! Thank you for representing us so well and thanks for the medical break down of some of our favorite movies.
Check out the full GQ episode below:
