‘The Lazarus Effect’ Star Olivia Wilde Describes Intense Filming Injury

Olivia Wilde was convinced she had caught the measles bug while working on new horror movie The Lazarus Effect after bursting all the blood vessels in her face during a tense scene.

The star plays a girl who is brought back from the dead in the thriller, and reveals she became concerned for her health after little red dots started covering her face following a shoot which involved her hanging upside down and screaming for a long period of time.

She explains, “I had these weird dots everywhere, like red dots, all over my face and I thought I was breaking out in measles or something, and the medic said, ‘No, you broke all your blood vessels’, and it stayed like that for a while. It kind of worked for the role, so it was OK.”

Wilde also had to contend with blindness due to the colored contact lenses she had to wear for the role to make her eyes look dark and bloodshot.

She says, “I could not see, I was totally blind, so they’d lead me onto the set and say, ‘The other actors are sitting here and here.’ It was kind of insane… (but) it was fun.”

The actress filmed The Lazarus Effect in 2013, but was called back for reshoots last spring, when she was heavily pregnant with her son Otis, and she admits her impending motherhood took the horror aspect to a whole new level.

She tells Today, “We did reshoots and I was eight and a half months pregnant so if you look really closely, you may be able to tell, maybe I’m a little puffier (in the face), but it was really funny because the image of me with the lenses and the death make-up and this huge belly, it was like a whole different horror movie.”

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