Viola Davis puts up quite a fight in her new action movie G20 — but her costar in the upcoming film, Ramon Rodriguez, could’ve used her might off-camera during a harrowing encounter with a scorpion during production of the film in South Africa.
“We were in Cape Town, we’d just arrived there, the time difference is like nine hours,” the Will Trent series actor said Wednesday morning on Good Morning America, after cohost Lara Spencer asked him about his on-set nickname, “Scorpion King,” during the interview.
“I’m finally falling asleep, and I feel something on my back, a little tingling. I swipe at it, and I feel like a hot needle to the back of my shoulder,” Rodriguez remembered. “I jumped out of bed, I put my phone light on, and it’s a scorpion staring at me in bed that stunned me in my sleep. I swiped it, I killed it.”
Rodriguez said that his “New Yorker” instincts then kicked in. “If there’s one, there’s more, like, where’s the rest of the scorpions? I didn’t find them. I’m so tired, I go back to bed,” he said.
He confirmed that he “didn’t get it treated” immediately after it happened, but when he called a friend back home, she quickly advised him to get help from a local doctor.
“They sent a doctor and [he looked at the] scorpion,” Rodriguez continued. “First of all, it stung me three times. I saw three welts on my back. He said, ‘You’re lucky. If a scorpion has big pincers, that means the venom is low. If it had small pincers, high venom.’ Luckily, mine had low venom. So, when I went back to set, from that moment, they called me the Scorpion King.”
Rodriguez wasn’t the only G20 star to get into a precarious situation while making the movie. Anthony Anderson appeared moments before on GMA, and told the cohosts a story about falling over a chair while cameras weren’t rolling — an instance Rodriguez also joked about during his interview.
In addition to his upcoming role in G20, Rodriguez’s Will Trent series — which airs Tuesdays on ABC — was also recently renewed for season 4.
