Image: The actor in question, Daniel Hoevels acting out the throat-slit, which he later experienced IRL.
This is so very British and macabre, and almost Oscar Wilde fictionalized “death by misadventure” as to be unbelievable. Yet truth is stranger than fiction: actor Daniel Hoevels inadvertently slit his own throat onstage when playing out his character’s suicide, when a real knife had been switched for the fake prop knife Hoevels was expecting to use. Psycho in the props department? Perhaps. Guardian UK tells us,
Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the “special effect”. Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests.
Things went wrong at Vienna’s Burgtheater as Hoevels’ character went to “kill himself” in the final scene of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, about Mary Queen of Scots, on Saturday night
It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong.
Though bleeding profusely, Hoevels survived because the knife missed the carotid artery as it sliced into his neck. Wolfgang Lenz, a doctor who treated him, said: “Just a little bit deeper and he would have been drowning in his own blood.”
One officer told Austrian TV news: “The rumours are wild, with some claiming that he was the victim of jealous rival. (…read more, guardian.co.uk)
Update: This incident has been deemed a “stage accident.” That’s a hell of an accident.