Michael Clarke Duncan Talks Apes

"It's a lot different [than the original]," Duncan said. "It's not a spin-off. It's totally different because in the original Planet of the Apes they had a lot of guns. We don't have any guns. We have really foreign weapons like clubs and stuff of that nature."

Duncan went on to describe two of the action scenes in which he performed.

"I have a fight with Kris and he's running at me with a lit spear," Duncan explained. "Before we do it I say, 'Now, I'm gonna go right. You go right so we'll go like this." Duncan demonstrated missing each other. "I said, 'Don't you go left when I go right because we'll run right into each other. At a couple of feet veer and then the camera will come close on me.' But Kris got extremely close with that lit spear and at the last second I just kind of went back and slid. I wiped his feet right out from under him. That was right before I did my ankle.

"I was injured doing a leap that I knew I could do," Duncan recalled. "It's where Attar, my character, sees something, comes down, runs and leaps these three steps. I did it 15 times before lunch, but this was after lunch. Tim [Burton] was like, 'Okay, we're gonna start from that scene again' and I'm like, 'Uh, the leap scene?' He said, 'Yeah, I've got some more ideas.' So, I'm telling myself, 'Come on, you're not tired, you're not tired.' So we did it five more times and I told him, 'You know what? This is my last one. I'm not leaping like I was.' I didn't have the power I did before lunch. So he said, 'Okay, give me one more and we'll move to something else.' So I ran, did this one more, and my left heel caught the last step and I rolled it. It was a bad sprain. I tore a couple of ligaments on my foot and it really hurt. I just thought, 'Man, this is so clumsy of me.' The hard part was going to the emergency room in the makeup. That was silly. The minute I got wheeled in, in all my ape armor and my big paw feet up, I said, 'Do you guys remember The Green Mile? That's me.'"