Russell Crowe broke both his legs on the Robin Hood set

Russell Crowe will give his all for the art of cinema — including shattering both of his legs.

In an interview with PEOPLE, the Gladiator star revealed that he broke both legs while shooting a stunt for Ridley Scott’s 2010 adventure epic Robin Hood. "I jumped off a castle portcullis onto rock-hard uneven ground," he said. "We should have prepped the ground and buried a pad but we were in a rush to get the shot done in the fading light."

Crowe felt that too much was riding on his execution of the stunt to back out of it. "With hundreds of extras around, arrows flying and burn pots setting the castle on fire, there was no pulling out," he said. "As I jumped, I remember thinking, 'This is going to hurt.'" His prediction was right: "It was like an electric shock bursting up through my body… we were shooting a big movie, so you just struggle through, but the last month of that job was very tricky. There was a number of weeks where even walking was a challenge."

Crowe didn’t end up getting treated for his injuries — or even consulting with a doctor until years later. "I thought it was nothing serious," he said, adding that he "never discussed the injury with production, never took a day off because of it, I just kept going to work.”

The actor sees his physical resilience as a commitment to his craft. "Apparently I finished that movie with two broken legs," he said. "All for art. No cast, no splints, no painkillers, just kept going to work and over time they healed themselves."

Crowe didn’t discover the full extent of his leg injuries until a decade after the shoot, when a doctor asked him when he broke his legs. "Apparently he could see the remnants of fractures in both shin bones," the actor recalled. "To jog my memory he said, 'Would have been maybe 10 years ago?'"

The Nice Guys star retroactively realized that training for 2013’s Man of Steel, in which he played Superman’s father Jor-El, may have helped accelerate the healing process.  "In retrospect I obviously knew something was wrong," he said. "To be the Kryptonian father of Superman was six months of incredibly intense physical training. Between the time off and that training, things fixed themselves."

Crowe’s new action film Land of Bad is now playing in theaters.

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