Jorma Taccone said a fall from a ladder while he was finishing a mural at his home in Connecticut left him unable to walk for months, a wrenching accident that came just as his new film "Over Your Dead Body" reached theaters on April 24. The one-third of The Lonely Island described the injury as so severe that he said he was screaming for an ambulance for ten minutes.
Taccone said the fall happened on his daughter's birthday and left him with a shattered left pelvis, breaks on the right side and a sacrum that detached from his spine on the left. He said, seven months after the accident, that he was finally walking again during a Variety interview in Brooklyn, adding that he had a moment when his life flashed before his eyes.
The injury story lands alongside a very different professional one for Taccone, whose name is tied to comedy through The Lonely Island and Saturday Night Live digital shorts. He directed "MacGruber" in 2010 and co-directed "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" with Akiva Schaffer in 2014, but "Over Your Dead Body" moves him into darker material. The film is a remake of the Norwegian-language "The Trip" and stars Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as a married couple.
That contrast matters because the movie opens with a relationship built on collapse rather than punch lines, as Segel and Weaving play a couple who initially plan to murder each other. Taccone's own account of recovery also gives the film's release a sharply personal backdrop: after months unable to walk, he said, "I’m walking. It’s really nice to have the bar so unbelievably low."
For Taccone, the end of the ordeal appears less like a grand recovery than a hard-earned return to ordinary movement, which is enough for now. His own words put it plainly: "This is all part of my journey."
