Every scar has a story. You might have a scar on your knee from when you fell off your bike as a kid. Or a cool scar on your face from a sword duel when you fought off Cardinal Richelieu’s men alongside Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (or was that just a dream?). And even though there are a lot of things that separate us from celebrities, we all have one thing in common—scars.
Stars aren’t immune to getting scars. The stories behind them can be fascinating and give us a closer look into who celebs are as people and what their pasts were like. Imgur user Cheesemenolike collected some celeb facial scar stories and shared them on the internet. We've added some other stories about how celebs got their scars—and not just facial ones, either. Scroll down, upvote the stories that left an impression on you and let us know in the comments what you thought of them.
Cheesemenolike's post got more than 119k views and over 4.8k upvotes in less than 15 hours since posting. According to the Imgurian, they love being on Imgur but sensed that people are getting very tired from all the political and coronavirus-related posts. "People go to Imgur for interesting or funny things. So I decided to post something I personally would like to read," the Imgurian told Bored Panda. Scroll down for the rest of our interview with Cheesemenolike and have a read, dear Pandas.
#1 Tommy Flanagan
He has a facial scar that is known as a Glasgow Smile. He grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, in a rough part of the city. As he left a pub one night after a dj gig, a group of people tried to rob him. He fought back and was stabbed. They slashed his face from ear to ear.
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259points
#2 Jason Momoa
Momoa got the scar running across his left eyebrow back in 2008. He was at a Hollywood bar when a man attacked him with a broken pint glass and cut him.
The actor had to get 140 stitches during reconstructive surgery! Meanwhile, Momoa's attacker was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
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228points
#3 Sean Bean
Bean got the scar on his face when Harrison Ford accidentally hit him with a boat hook. They were shooting Bean's death scene in the 1992 movie Patriot Games.
However, there is an upside to all of this. Bean's scar meant that he looked much more rugged than before and landed him a role in Sharpe's Rifles. The scar also gave Bean's characters Boromir in The Lord of the Rings and Odysseus in Troy more depth and a certain world-weariness.
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"It wasn't too difficult to research. I have an interest for trivia about these things so some stories I already knew," Cheesemenolike told us how he collected the info about celebs.
For Cheesemenolike personally, the most interesting story was that of Joaquin Phoenix. "He has stated numerous times that his mother felt a sharp pain when being pregnant with him and that his scar is merely a birth mark. But I heard in the discussion underneath the post he stated something else in the recent year, that it is in fact a cleft lip/palate," they said.
"I think he is a great actor and I love his complex back ground story. His family took on the last name Phoenix to represent their rise from the ashes after a difficult time."
#4 Tina Fey
Tina has a thin scar running underneath her lips, to the left side of her face. A violent attacker assaulted her with a knife when she was just 5 years old. The man was never found
Tina wrote more about the incident in her book Bossypants. "During the spring semester of kindergarten, I was slashed in the face by a stranger in the alley behind my house," she writes. According to her, a lot of people are interesting to hear about her scar. Some people think that a cat did this. While others are very upfront about it.
"Then there's another sort of person who thinks it makes them seem brave or sensitive or wonderfully direct to ask me about it right away. They ask with quiet, feigned empathy, 'How did you get your scar?' The grossest move is when they say they're only curious because 'it's so beautiful.' Ugh. Disgusting. They might as well walk up and say, 'May I be amazing at you?' To these folks let me be clear. I'm not interested in acting out a TV movie with you where you befriend a girl with a scar. An Oscar-y Spielberg movie where I play a mean German with a scar? Yes."
Tina explained that throughout her life, the people who ask her about her scar within one week of knowing her have "invariably turned out to be egomaniacs of average intelligence or less."
She writes: "My scar was a miniature form of celebrity. Kids knew who I was because of it. Lots of people liked to claim they were there when it happened. I was there. I saw it. Crazy Mike did it! Adults were kind to me because of it. Aunts and family friends gave me Easter candy and oversize Hershey's Kisses long after I was too old for presents. I was made to feel special. What should have shut me down and made me feel 'less than' ended up giving me an inflated sense of self. It wasn't until years later, maybe not until I was writing this book, that I realized people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed."
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#5 Seal
There have been a lot of rumors about Seal's scars. Some thought that they're tribal ritual scars. While others believed that they were the result of some horrible accident.
However, none of those rumors are correct. The singer-songwriter has scars on his face because he suffered from Discoid Lupus Erythematosus as a child.
DLE is a skin disease that causes inflammation, lesions, scarring, and permanent hair loss.
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179points
#6 Keanu Reeves
Keanu got his abdominal scar when he wrecked his motorcycle in Topanga Canyon. He was on a so-called 'demon ride (which means having no headlights on at night) when he crashed into the side of a mountain. He was hospitalized for a week with broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.
Keanu talked about how he got his scar with Chris Heath of Rolling Stone magazine. "I call that a demon ride," Keanu told him. "That’s when things are going badly. But there’s other times when you go fast, or too fast, out of exhilaration. I remember saying in my head, 'I’m going to die.'" Keanu spent half an hour lying on the pavement before help arrived.
"I remember calling out for help. And someone answering out of the darkness, and then the flashing lights of an ambulance coming down. This was after a truck ran over my helmet. I took it off because I couldn’t breathe, and a truck came down. I got out of the way, and it ran over my helmet," the actor shared.
Keanu says that this is the lesson that he learned: "Now I know that if I want to take a demon ride and I don’t want to die . . . then I shouldn’t take it." He added that had to get a couple more 'demon rides' out of his system and "probably" has a couple more left.
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The Imgurian also shared with Bored Panda their own scar stories. "After I broke my right arm and was in a cast for six weeks, I burned my right hand with boiling water. It healed very well though, and the scar looks like freckles. I had to write with my left hand for months on end," they revealed what happened when they were 10 years old.
"Maybe there will be a next segment soon," Cheesemenolike said about their future plans for Imgur posts. "It's not something I wanna put a lot of time in, just a couple of posts every month or so about various objects if I can find the time."
#7 Andy Warhol
Warhol was an American artist and a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. He was shot and seriously wounded by an attack in 1968 and barely survived: surgeons had to open his chest and massage his heart to help stimulate it.
Warhol's attacker was Valerie Solanas who was a radical feminist writer and advocated the elimination of men. In fact, she actually appeared in one of his films, 'I, a Man' (1968).
Solanas' bullet damaged both of Warhol's lungs and he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life.
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#8 J. R. Martinez
Actor and motivational speaker Martinez sustained severe burns to over 34 percent of his body in 2003 while serving as an Army infantryman in Iraq.
He was driving a Humvee when its left front tire hit an IED. Martinez was evacuated to the Ramstein air base in Germany for immediate care. Later, he was transferred to the Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.
Martinez spent 34 months there and underwent 33 plastic surgery and skin graft surgeries. Since recovering, he has traveled around the US speaking about his experiences to corporations, veterans groups, schools, and other organizations.
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156points
#9 Steve Buscemi
Buscemi got his scar in 2001 while filming the movie Domestic Disturbance, in North Carolina. One day, Buscemi, actor Vince Vaughn, and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg went out to a bar called the Firebelly Lounge.
After a woman started chatting to Vaughn, a fight broke out with her boyfriend. Buscemi rushed to his friend's aid and that's when 21-year-old Timothy Fogerty stabbed him above the eye, in the jaw, in the throat, and in the arm. Buscemi could have died from his wounds. Luckily, he survived. The police had to use pepper spray to put an end to the brawl.
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Scars are a natural part of life because it’s your body’s way to heal and repair wounds. Unfortunately, human beings aren’t like some animals that can regenerate without scarring.
When we get cut or burned, the first thing that happens is that we bleed. The blood then forms a clot and later on—a scab. This is our bodies’ way of stopping yucky infections from getting into our blood. While the top part of the scab is hard, the bottom part becomes host to cells that scientists call fibroblasts. It’s their job to replace the scab with scar tissue to close the wound as quickly as possible. Think of it this way: if there’s a hole in your roof and it’s raining, you’d want to plug the hole ASAP, no matter how ugly it might look.
#10 Harrison Ford
Out of all of these stories, Ford's is probably the most mundane. He got the scar on his chin back in 1964 when he moved to LA to pursue a career in Hollywood.
He was driving to his job at Bullock's department store one morning when he realized that he forgot to put his seat belt.
While Ford was fumbling for it, he veered off the road and crashed the car into a telephone pole. The crash was so powerful that Ford slammed his chin on the steering wheel and then flew through the windshield.
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#11 Jonah Hill
He was 15 when it all came to a head. He and a friend snuck out one night in an SUV. Hill stuck his elbow out the open window as they headed into the night, and his friend started turning the wheel back and forth, joking around. The car flipped over, skidded along the road and dragged Hill’s arm with it. Hill woke up in the hospital, and he heard two doctors discussing whether or not to amputate his arm
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#12 Michael K. Williams
Actor Williams got his scar on his 25th birthday during a bar fight on Jamaica Avenue in New York City.
He drank too much, got in an argument with other men at a bar and they cut him with a razor blade from the top of his head to his neck. He nearly died.
Since that night, Williams' scar has become his signature feature and helped him get offers to perform as a thug in music videos and gave him modeling opportunities with known photographers like David LaChapelle.
"The cut on my face was actually the first hit of the fight, so we managed to escape with our lives, barely, that night," Williams said. "Things changed immediately after that. Directors didn't want me just to dance in videos anymore. They wanted me to act out these thug rolls. They were like, 'Mike, roll these dice in this video! Have this fight in this video!' I was like, 'All right!'"
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Even though scars are made from collagen just like our ‘normal’ skin, the two feel and look different. That has everything to do with how collagen is ‘woven’ in the two tissues: normal skin has a random cross-weave collagen structure while scars have collagen that’s aligned parallel, according to mathematicians John C. Dallon and Jonathan A. Sherratt.
Meanwhile, new studies like the one conducted by the German Research Center for Environmental Health indicate that there might be something more to how our bodies produce scars. Researchers have found indications that scars might actually originate from “reservoirs of matrix jelly” and these new findings could completely change what we know about scarring and anti-scarring therapies.
#13 Sharon Stone
Stone got the scar on her neck when she was a child: she was riding on a horse and ran into a taut cord. Stone's scar is concealed in a lot of publicity photos using make-up and airbrushing.
Her neck scar sparked a lot rumors, one of which that it's supposedly related to a facelift.
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#14 Queen Latifah
She has a two-inch scar just under her hairline. When she was 3, she was playing tag with her brother. She tripped and hit her head on the corner of the bathroom wall. After getting three stitches, she fell and busted it open again
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108points
#15 Padma Lakshmi
She was hospitalized for three weeks. Two days after her discharge from the hospital, she was injured in a car accident in Malibu, California, which left her with a fractured right hip and a shattered right upper arm. The arm injury required surgery, which left her with a seven-inch scar between her elbow and shoulder.
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95points
#16 Joaquin Phoenix
Phoenix was born with a scar between his lip and nose: it's most likely a microform cleft which is the mildest form of cleft lip and usually appears as a scar or a small notch. Around 6.8k babies born in the US each year have some form of cleft lip or cleft palate.
The actor said in interviews that he thinks it's a birthmark that was a the result of an "act of God." He said: "While pregnant with me, my mother felt a sharp pain one day, and I was born with a mark on my lip."
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93points
#17 Kaley Cuoco
She completely crushed the bottom of her leg during a horseback riding incident.
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86points
#18 Charlie Puth
Fans have speculated that singer Charlie Puth shaves his eyebrow, he actually was bitten by a dog when he was two
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84points
#19 Sandra Bullock
She has a tiny scar near her left eye. She's reportedly had it since she was little, as she fell into a lake once and hit her head on a rock.
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80points
#20 Prince William
The Prince was accidentally hit with a golf club when he was 13
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78points