Celebrity Scars and the Stories Behind Them
There's a story to go with every scar. Some are scary, some are profound, and some might even be hilarious. We know a lot of these stories from celebrities who have scars since their looks are so scrutinized. Here are some of the explanations behind celebrity scars, from the mundane, like falling into a creek as a child, to the outrageous, including so many barroom brawls.
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Keanue Reeves is an avid motorcycle rider, and he's got the scars to prove it. He got a long vertical scar on his abdomen from an accident on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in 1988 when he took what he calls a "demon ride," crashed, laid on the pavement for a half-hour thinking he was going to die, and had to have his spleen removed. There's also a long scar running up his entire right leg from a separate accident where his leg "took a car bumper off." Yikes.
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The scars on the left side of Tina Fey's face and chin are from a horrendous attack. When she was only 5, a stranger came up to her in her yard and slashed her with a knife. According to interviews, she didn't think much of it until she was acting, which put the literal spotlight on it. "I was a very confident little kid," Fey said. "It's really almost like I'm kind of able to forget about it, until I was on-camera."
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The prominent scar across Michael K. Williams' face was the result of an attack as well. On his 25th birthday, he was leaving a party when a group of men surrounded him and his friends. One of them slashed Williams' face with a razor blade between his fingers. He and his friends escaped, but he had that scar for life. He felt the scar got him more acting roles, though, including his breakout role in the movie "Bullet" alongside Tupac Shakur. Known for his roles on "The Wire" and "Boardwalk Empire," Williams died this past September.
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The scar above his left eye where his eyebrow doesn't grow is one of Jason Momoa's most distinctive features. He got it when a man at a bar smashed a pint glass in his face, leading to a whopping 140 stitches. It happened at the Bird Cafe in Hollywood, and the attacker suffered injuries to his hand that required stitches as well. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for the attack.
Also known for his scar above the eye, Sean Bean got the mark from another actor on this list. While filming a fight scene on the set of "Patriot Games" in 1992, Harrison Ford accidentally caught Bean in the face with a boat hook. He ended up with eight stitches and the forehead scar — not to mention a promising career that often included a fictional backstory about the scar.
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There's a large area of scarring on Jonah Hill's right arm near his elbow. He explained to Rolling Stone that he acted out as a kid, and one night when he was 15, he was in a car with his friends. He had his arm out the window, and his friend started turning the wheel back and forth to joke around. The car tipped over and dragged his arm on the ground. He woke up in the hospital to see his fraught parents and decided that he wasn't going to put them through anything like that again.
Seal is known almost as much for his prominent facial scars as he is his singing. They come from an autoimmune skin condition and type of lupus called discoid lupus erythematosus that generally affects the scalp, cheeks, and ears with lesions that leave scars. He had the scars by his 20s, so he achieved almost all his success after developing them.
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It was a bar fight that got Steve Buscemi the scar on the left side of his neck and cheek. He was in North Carolina filming the movie "Domestic Disturbance" when he and co-star Vince Vaughn went to a bar called Firebelly. A woman came up to chat with Vaughn and an altercation started that resulted in Buscemi getting stabbed on his face, neck, and arms. The attacker was charged with assault with a deadly weapon — and Vaughn was arrested, fined, and released for his part in the fight as well.
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There's a scar right down the middle of Queen Latifah's forehead, but it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. She got it when she was 3 years old by tripping over a phone cord and hitting her head on the bathroom door, requiring stitches. She's said she prefers that magazines don't airbrush out the scar in photographs. "It's part of who I am, so I'd like it to be accepted as part of who I am," she said in a Chicago Tribune interview.
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Joe Jonas, one of the superstar members of the Jonas Brothers, has a visible scar on the bridge of his nose between his eyes. Unsurprisingly, it was antics with his brothers that caused it. While they were filming a video for YouTube, he ran into a wall and it started bleeding. It required surgery to fix, leading to the scar.
The noticeable 7-inch scar on Padma Lakshmi's right arm is from a terrible car accident when she was 14. She was driving with her parents when the car flew off the freeway and 40 feet down an embankment, where they hit a tree that fell onto the car's roof. Her parents were flown by helicopter to a hospital (they survived) and Lakshmi was taken by ambulance for a broken hip and shattered right arm. It required extensive surgery to fix, leading to the scar that she initially tried to hide in her career as a model, but eventually embraced as a reminder of her survival.
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Prince William has a scar just like Harry Potter, he often jokes. It's above his eyebrow in about the same place as the fictional character's scar. And like the character's, the prince's scar is noticeable sometimes, and other times it's hard to see. He got it at 13 while playing golf with a friend. "We were on a putting green and the next thing you know there was a 7-iron and it came out of nowhere and it hit me in the head," he said in an interview.
Prince William's wife, Kate Middleton, also has a visible scar, though hers is more of a mystery. It's a few inches long and just above her hairline on the left side of her scalp. It's impossible to see when her hair is down, but you can see it sometimes when it's pulled back. When the Palace was asked about it, the response was simply that it was the result of a childhood operation.
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Harrison Ford's chin scar is not only noticeable, it also contributes to his signature rugged look. He got it back in 1964 after he moved to Los Angeles. He was working at Bullock's department store, and on his way to work one morning, he started putting his seatbelt on while driving. That distracted him enough to veer off the road and into a telephone pole, slamming his face into the steering wheel. He needed surgery, which left the scar.
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The story behind "Sons of Anarchy" actor Tommy Flanagan's prominent facial scar is particularly gruesome. He grew up in a rough part of Glasgow, and one night after a DJ gig at a club, he was attacked by would-be robbers. He tried to fight back, but he was outnumbered, and one of them gave him what's known as a Glasgow smile, a cut that extends from both sides of the mouth to the ears so it scars in the shape of a smile.
The long scar running up "Big Bang Theory" actress Kaley Cuoco's left ankle and shin was the result of a horseback riding fall in 2010. She fell off the horse but was initially fine. Then the horse decided to jump over her, landing on her ankle. She thought the sound it made was crunching leaves under the horse's hoof, but it was bone. Her lower leg was shattered, and two steel bars later, she's got a scar to prove it.
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It's very easy to miss Sandra Bullock's tiny scar near the outside of her left eye under her eyebrow — it looks like it could just be a natural wrinkle. But she got it when she was a child. She fell into a creek when she was playing and hit her head on a rock, creating the scar we see today.
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Kylie Jenner is not shy about the long scar on her leg, even showing it off on the cover of GQ. The story of how she got it involves her and her sister, Kendall, playing hide-and-seek when she was 5. She hid inside an area with a tall gate, and had to climb over it to get out when her sister didn't find her. She slipped and a sharp pole went into her leg, tearing through it and leaving a scar from the back of her knee to her thigh.
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Not only is Britain's Princess Eugenie not embarrassed by her scar, she wanted to show it off at her royal wedding. The long scar going down her neck and back is from a surgery when she was 12. She had scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, that often starts during the early teen years. Doctors put two metal rods on either side of her spine and she's been fine since recovering from surgery. She decided to choose a wedding dress that showed her upper back as a way to "honor the people who looked after me and a way of standing up for young people who also go through this," she said.
