Aaron Sorkin recalled breaking his nose while writing a scene for “The Newsroom,” joking that the amount of blood would have been too much even for a Martin Scorsese movie.
“The Social Reckoning” filmmaker appeared on Tuesday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” where he humored host Michael Kosta with some of his wild screenwriting tales. Specifically, he recounted how he broke his nose while acting out a scene he was trying to figure out for HBO’s “The Newsroom.”
“I once broke my nose writing, because I had this –,” Sorkin said before Kosta interrupted with, “What?! Were you skiing and writing?”
“I got an idea for what I thought was a funny moment, this was on ‘The Newsroom.’ And I thought it was a funny moment,” Sorkin shared. “I was going to have a character just kind of lunge at another character. Two people were going to hold him back. It’s a comedy staple. It’s a ‘Let me at him, let me at him’ moment. And I was very excited about this and I was acting it out.”
Per Sorkin, while acting out this moment, he “traveled into [his] bathroom and lunged forward.” Yet, since Sorkin didn’t have the two people he envisioned for the scene holding him back, he smacked his face right into the mirror.
“If it had been a Scorsese film, he would have said, ‘All right, cut, let’s do that again, but this time, just less blood,’” he quipped.
As Sorkin went on, he recalled calling a good friend to come over – and how he wanted to talk about the scene instead of getting medical help.
“And she came over, going, ‘My God, we have to take you to the emergency room,’” he remembered. “And I said, ‘Yeah, but just read this, because I think it’s really fun.’”
Watch Sorkin’s re-telling of the moment below.
Sorkin first copped to the accident in 2011, when he told attendees at an Emmy event, “I wish I could say I was in a bar fight, but I broke my nose while writing.”
He expanded on the details in 2012, telling the Wall Street Journal that he was the “only person to ever break their nose writing.”
“I’m the first actor to play all the parts. I’m doing the whole thing out loud in my car, alone in a room,” he said at the time. “There’s a moment in the second episode when Will [played by Jeff Daniels] does a classic Jackie Gleason I’m-going-to-kill-you lunge, and somebody has to hold him back. I was writing that in the middle of the night at home and had made my way into the bathroom. When it came time for the lunge, there was nobody to hold me back, and I smashed my face into a mirror and broke my nose.”
“The Social Reckoning” hits theaters in the U.S. on Friday.
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