Spider-Man’s battered Broadway stunt double is finally talking, and he’s got none of the web slinger’s usual wisecracks to offer about his harrowing onstage fall.
“The last thing I remember was, like, uh, just going, ‘Oh, God,’ ” Christopher Tierney, a stuntman in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” tells WCBS-TV news in an exclusive interview airing tonight at 11.
“I was falling, and then I saw, once I hit the darkness of the stage, I had to just turn it real quick, so I wasn’t going to fall on my head and I crashed on my back,” he tells Channel 2’s Dana Tyler.
Tierney, 32, plummeted about 30 feet on Dec. 20 in front of an audience near the climax of a performance of the injury-plagued Broadway production.
He spent eight days at Bellevue Hospital recovering from four broken ribs, a hairline skull fracture, a broken scapula, a bruised lung, three cracked vertebrae and broken bones below his elbow.
Last Tuesday, Tierney was moved to an unidentified New York rehabilitation center and is expected to head home to Portsmouth, NH, after he is released from the facility on Wednesday.
“He is up,” Tierney’s father, Tim, told CNN yesterday. “He is walking and just doing very well.”
The stuntman hopes to return to the big-budget show as soon as he can.
The show went dark for two days after his fall and didn’t resume until new safety precautions were put in place following a meeting between the show’s company, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the state Department of Labor.
The show, with music and lyrics by U2’s Bono and The Edge, has been beset by cast injuries and technical problems.
At the time of his fall, Tierney was wearing a harness and wire that should have lifted him in the air, but he came loose and plummeted.
The fall has been blamed on human error.
Tierney is the fourth cast member to have been in a serious accident in the show, which at $65 million is the most expensive production in Broadway history.