What's Love Got to Do With It star recalls Laurence Fishburne stunt gone wrong: 'He slapped the l...

&34;One side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good.'&34; What's Love Got to Do With It star recalls Laurence Fishburne stunt gone wrong: 'He slapped the living s out of me' &34;One side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good.'&34; By Ryan Coleman :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/RyanColemanauthorphoto0081ce8f0254478080f35972c433877b.jpg) Ryan Coleman Ryan Coleman is a news writer for with previous work in MUBI Notebook, Slant, and the LA Review of Books.

"One side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good.'"

What's Love Got to Do With It star recalls Laurence Fishburne stunt gone wrong: 'He slapped the living s--- out of me'

"One side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good.'"

By Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman is a news writer for with previous work in MUBI Notebook, Slant, and the LA Review of Books.

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December 2, 2025 11:55 p.m. ET

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Vanessa Bell Calloway in 'What's Love Got to Do With It'. Credit:

Buena Vista Pictures

- Vanessa Bell Calloway says that one infamous *What's Love Got to Do With It *accidentally went too far.

- Laurence Fishburne, who played the abusive Ike Turner in the 1993 Tina Turner biopic, mistakenly slapped Calloway for real when he was meant to only mimic the motion.

- "My face was pounding. I mean, it was like, thump! The one side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good,'" Calloway recalled.**

*What's Love Got to Do With It *star Vanessa Bell Calloway is revealing the secret to her stunning performance in one of the film's most violent scenes — it was all real.

The infamous "cake scene" dramatizes an account from *I, Tina Turner*, the 1986 memoir by the Queen of Rock and Roll herself, and the primary source material for *What's Love Got to Do With It*. Turner wrote that her abusive husband and creative partner, Ike Turner, humiliated Tina by forcing her to eat an entire cake in public. In the film, however, Ike (Laurence Fishburne) actually shoves cake in Tina's (Angela Bassett) face when she refuses to eat it, and slaps her friend Jackie (Calloway) to the ground when she attempts to intervene.

"They wanted to put the double in for the slap, and then I'd pop up. So I told the director, I told Brian Gibson, 'You know what? This is not going to be right because I need to be in the moment, and when I get up, then I could tell him off, and I need to have that energy, that adrenaline,'" Calloway recalled in a recent interview with Cocoa Butter reflecting on her most memorable roles. "So [he] said, 'Okay, the choreographer of the stunt, he'll show you, he teaches you when this hand goes this way, you turn your head really aggressively, it looks like a slap, and they put the sound in later.'"

That isn't, unfortunately, how the screen played out when Gibson called "Action!"

"On one take, we missed. We didn't have the eye connection and he slapped the living s--- out of me," Calloway recalled. "My face was pounding. I mean, it was like, thump! The one side of my brain was like, 'Ow,' and the other side was, 'Oh, keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good. This going to be good.'"

"I sound sick," the *Coming to America *star laughed.

Laurence Fishburne in 'What's Love Got to Do with It'.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Calloway explained that everyone on set could instantly tell that the slap had accidentally connected, but she kept the scene going. "I slap, and I roll, and I get up, and baby, I let him have it. And that's the take they used. I don't blame [Gibson], because if I was a director or producer, that's the one I would have used, because I didn't stop. Of course, when they cut, everybody ran to me with ice packs and everything to make sure I was okay. But I mean he slapped the poop out of me."

Angela Bassett pays tribute to Tina Turner: 'I am humbled'

Laurence Fishburne wants to play Charles Xavier in MCU's version of X-Men

* *has reached out to a representative for Fishburne for comment.

***Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.***

Bassett was praised upon the movie's release for her depiction of a woman enduring abuse at the hands of her husband, whom the public thought was her most ardent supporter. In 2021, two years before her death, Turner finally opened up about those dark and stormy years with Ike in the HBO documentary *Tina*, noting, "I had an abusive life. There's no other way to tell the story."****

Vanessa Bell Calloway, Laurence Fishburne, and Angela Bassett in 'What's Love Got to Do With It'.

Buena Vista Pictures

Following Turner's 2023 death after a long illness at 83 years old, Bassett, who was nominated for Best Actress at the 1994 Academy Awards, memorialized the trailblazer she grew close to during production.

"How do we say farewell to a woman who owned her pain and trauma and used it as a means to help change the world?" she shared in a statement at the time. "Through her courage in telling her story, her commitment to stay the course in her life, no matter the sacrifice, and her determination to carve out a space in rock & roll for herself and for others who look like her, Tina Turner showed others who lived in fear what a beautiful future filled with love, compassion, and freedom should look like."

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