'The Old Guard' star Charlize Theron needed three surgeries for on-set injuries

Charlize Theron detailed the injuries she sustained from performing her own stunts for the Netflix film "The Old Guard," which required her to undergo three surgeries.

The actress is no stranger when it comes to doing action stunts. She has built a name for herself as a stellar action star from her movies "Aeon Flux," "Atomic Blonde," and "Mad Max: Fury Road" to name a few. It was not surprising to see her perform her action sequences in "Old Guard" despite having to do them with a broken thumb and pinched nerve.

Theron injured her hand, but with five weeks of filming left she had to carry on. She said "it was absolutely impossible" for her to find out how bad the injury was so she "fought through."

"I had do to an entire fight over five days with a thumb that was torn off the bone. So I basically lost all control of my hand. [And I was] shooting all this stuff riding a horse with a hand that had no function in it," Theron told Stellar.

On top of the injured thumb, she also had a pinched nerve in her elbow. She said it was only after filming "The Old Guard" that she realised she needed three surgeries.

This was not the only serious injury Theron sustained from doing her own action stunts. She herniated a disk in her neck after a fall while filming "Aeon Flux." She recalled that it was "pretty serious," so much so, that they had to shut down production.

"It was really close to my spinal cord. I could have been paralysed," Theron remembered.

"The injury was really eye-opening. Especially [and even more so] when you have children. It's like, wait a second... I want to be around for these things. What am I doing?" she said.

In the same interview, Theron admitted that she performs her action stunts based on her strengths and not based on stereotypes of what an action star is supposed to be. She said she can never be like Tom Cruise who jumps on buildings because she has a fear of heights.

In "The Old Guard," Theron plays Andy, a 6,000-year-old immortal soldier who wields a battle axe to fight her enemies.