Screen star Carey Mulligan has revealed her real panic trying to rescue co-star Ralph Fiennes from under a landslide while filming.
The actress still has scars on her hands from frantically scrabbling earth off the buried Oscar nominee.
The two were filming a scene in The Dig, the story of an archaeologist uncovering an Anglo-Saxon ship.
Bafta winner Carey, 35, was worried director Simon Stone’s pit-side cave-in scene was too realistic as Schindler’s List star Ralph, 58, got covered.
She said filming the scene took “ages” and added: “We were so exhausted that it matched exactly how exhausted you would be in real life, so nothing about it felt fake.
“I kept saying to Simon, ‘I don’t like it , I don’t like the responsibility.’
"It really was Ralph in every take, and he really was buried under that dirt. I’ve still got scars on my knuckles, and scratches. All the actors were thinking, ‘We’ve got to get Ralph out’.”
She added to Total Film mag: “It was terrifying. His mouth was covered, and his nose was covered.”
But Ralph’s biggest worry about his safety was being accidentally being hit as fellow actors tried to dig him out.
He said: “It wasn’t that I was being crushed by earth, but I remember just feeling really cold because I was surrounded by this damp, cold earth and clay.
"I was more anxious they wouldn’t know where my face was, and would thrust their arm in... sort of punch me.”
Ralph and Carey play amateur archaeologist Basil Brown and landowner Edith Pretty in the film about the discovery of the ship at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, in 1939.
Brown uncovers the vessel, the burial ship of an East Anglian great warrior or king, filled with valuable artefacts.
But tragedy nearly strikes when there is a cave-in during archaeological work.
Film-makers created a life-size replica of the site in a field in Godalming, Surrey, where the excavation scenes were filmed during cold weather in November 2019.
The Dig’s January cinema release has been delayed due to Covid restrictions.
It will be on Netflix from January 29.
