Dylan O’Brien says his safety concerns on Maze Runner set ‘were not listened to’ before near-fatal accident

Dylan O’Brien claimed his concerns about safety on the set of The Maze Runner: The Death Cure were not respected and resulted in him sustaining severe injuries while filming.

The Teen Wolf alum, 33, reflected on his near-fatal “life-changing incident” while shooting for the third film in the Maze Runner franchise. He was thrown from a moving vehicle while doing a stunt and then hit by another vehicle, the actor revealed in a new interview with Men’s Health.

The accident left him with a concussion, a facial fracture and brain trauma.

Production was halted in April 2016 while O’Brien recuperated. Shooting finally resumed the next year, and the film was released in January 2018. The Independent has reached out to 20th Century Studios for comment.

“It was a life-changing incident. I’ve approached everything differently, you could say, particularly with regards to standing my ground on set,” O’Brien told Men’s Health. “It’s very commonplace in the culture for young actors to be controlled, and the way they strive to do that is by always being like, ‘Oh, don’t become difficult. Don’t be a pain in the ass.’ Or, ‘Are you complaining, are you being difficult?’ Things like that.”

O’Brien said the key lesson from the accident was that he needed to advocate for himself and not conflate looking out for himself with thinking he was being “difficult”.

“I learned after the accident to not conflate taking care of yourself and looking after yourself. Do not let them manipulate you into thinking that’s being difficult, because I can look at that day and know I was a 24-year-old kid who was raising concerns about how we were approaching things, and they were not listened to, they were not respected,” he said.

“And then what happened happened. And by all accounts, it was all pretty gotten away with, I would say, as well. I know the person I am, and the character I bring to set, and the way I treat people and the way that I treat a workspace, and I know I’m not difficult. I know I’m not an a*****e. I know I was trying to protect myself that day, and so I have just never forgotten that. That’s always rung true as being the thing to hold with me.”

The actor has talked about his injuries previously, saying the accident “broke most of the right side of my face” and that he needed reconstructive surgery.

“I had a rough and long road back from that, probably more than people realise,” he told Deadline Hollywood. “It was a very private and personal thing for me. I was going through that s*** for a long time A lot of things in my life were changing and were difficult at that time. A lot of things in my career were changing too. I was fighting it for a while, and freaking out that I felt so f***ing broken. I had to accept that and sink into it.”

O’Brien plays actor-comedian Dan Aykroyd in the biographical comedy drama Saturday Night directed by Jason Reitman. The film follows “a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers” in the “90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live“, according to its official synopsis.

Saturday Night premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival in August and will be released worldwide on 11 October.