- The “Will Trent” actor was in South Africa filming “G20” with Viola Davis when a scorpion crawled into bed and stung him three times.
- Rodriguez didn’t initially seek treatment, but a doctor informed him of the potential severity of a scorpion bite.
- The incident earned him the nickname of “Scorpion King” on the “G20” set.
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 jump out of bed, I put my phone light on, and it’s a scorpion staring at me in bed that stung 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.”