Jim Caviezel Was Hospitalized Making 'Sound of Freedom'

Actor Jim Caviezel was rushed to hospital while filming the box office hit, Sound of Freedom but not before he finished filming a scene.

Caviezel, 54, plays Tim Ballard, the former government agent turned creator of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a global anti-child sex trafficking organization, in the film released on July 4. The story follows Ballard's journey from working at Homeland Security tracking pedophiles to breaking out on his own to rescue children from sex trafficking.

Filmed in 2019, Sound of Freedom had a paltry budget of $15 million compared to other Hollywood films. On one crucial day of filming, Caviezel was nowhere to be seen, according to the film's director, Alejandro Monteverde.

Monteverde told Newsweek in an exclusive chat that they were so worried about Caviezel who was not responding to calls or banging on his door, that they had to open it themselves to find the actor very ill.

"He got really sick, like hospital sick, to the point that we had to literally open his room because he was not opening the room. We were all like he didn't show up, he was just in bed and then we knew that he needed to go to the hospital," Monteverde said.

Knowing they had only one chance to film a critical scene before losing the location and another actor flying out the next day, Monteverde asked the almost impossible of his main star.

"But I went to him and I was like, 'look, we need to shoot the scene. I'm going to lose my location," Monteverde told Newsweek and explained he had to "rewrite the entire scene...to match his state of being."

In the scene, Caviezel's character is pretending to be deeply hungover and attends a meeting with a trafficker while holding a bucket.

"He had the bucket because he was throwing up in the bucket for real, and he was playing it as a hangover," Monteverde said, adding that Caviezel "actually could only give me one take, and then he would just lay down on the bed."

Thankfully, Caviezel was not too ill from what was likely a bad bout of gastroenteritis and after being taken to hospital bounced back to full health.

"He's a hard-working actor...another actor would be like 'I'm sick, I'm not shooting,'" Monteverde said of his leading man. "But we didn't have the resources to hire these locations again...so to work with an actor that had that conviction and to show up, I respect that highly."

While it was an independent film with a small budget, Sound of Freedom has gone on to be one of the biggest hits of summer. The film has made close to $180 million at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo, and will begin its international release later this month

Sound of Freedom managed to outperform mega franchises Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to become the 10th highest-grossing film in the United States so far this year.