Oscar hopeful Brendan Fraser recently went on The Kelly Clarkson Show to reminisce about the filming of The Mummy. While filming a hanging sequence, the actor’s neck was caught in a rope, and he nearly suffocated to death.

“I was choked out accidentally,” The Whale actor told Clarkson. He gives a detailed account of the stunt-gone-wrong, saying, “I was standing on my toes … and you only got so far to go. [Director Stephen Sommers] ran over and said, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really look like, you know, you’re choking. Can you sell it?’”

The next take, Frasier took this direction to heart. The actor continued the story by saying, “the camera swooped around, and I went up on the toes, and the guy holding the rope above me, he pulled it up a little higher, and I was stuck on my toes, and I had nowhere to go but down. So he was pulling up, and I was going down. And then the next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, and there was gravel in my teeth, and everybody was really quiet.”

While the experience felt unique to Frasier, the stunt coordinator recalls something similar to another action star. After trying to wake the anesthetized actor, the coordinator said, “congratulations, you’re in the club – same thing happened to Mel Gibson on Braveheart.”

Frasier seems to have gotten over the incident fairly well, summing up the early speed bump by saying, “we’re off to a blazing start in this movie so far.”