Have you ever started a game with your co-workers that they all quickly embraced? It’s a great feeling, right? Everyone needs to blow off some steam at the office from time to time, after all. However, what if the amusing jape you started was called “the punching game”, and it left a co-worker looking like they’d contracted a flesh-eating virus on their arm? This was the potential HR nightmare faced by Jennifer Lawrence on the set of X-Men: Apocalypse – but the rambunctious star maintains it was all in good fun.
Now, before going any further, it’s worth noting something: No, the cast was not punching each other because they knew the movie they were making was bad. Sadly, everyone involved would discover that along with the rest of the world when Apocalypse hit cinemas in May 2016.
Instead, Lawrence ported the game over from the sets of her uber-successful Hunger Games movies. However, she assured The Telegraph, “On the Hunger Games, we punched each other, but no one was trying to permanently, seriously harm someone.”
While this sentence is a tad alarming, it’s also worth noting that Lawrence isn’t saying the X-Men cast – including James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Oscar Isaac – were trying to seriously hurt each other. They were just big, jacked-up men shooting a superhero picture, and they couldn’t help getting carried away. Lawrence exclaimed, “They punched each other as hard as they possibly could. I mean, James’s arm was so black it looked like he had a flesh-eating virus.”
As a brief interlude before continuing this bone-crunching tale of an A-list superhero fight club, it’s worth explaining how the punching game works. Its brutal elegance is found in its simplicity: a player makes a circle with their thumb and forefinger and holds it just below their waist. If a fellow contestant looks down and sees the circle their enemy has made, they have to take a punch. Sometimes, a flurry of punches is allowed, depending on the bloodlust level of the rule-maker of their particular version of the game.
The game was first popularised by a second-season episode of the beloved sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, where it was known as ‘The Circle Game’ by Malcolm, Reese, Dewey and their friends. It stands to reason that this was where Lawrence first encountered the game – but the poor star had no idea about the can of worms she was opening on that X-Men set.
McAvoy admitted to The Telegraph that the game jumped up so many notches that “it was actually becoming an insurance risk”. He even found himself in a sticky situation with Hugh Jackman, who growled, “I’m going to put you through the wall” after McAvoy nailed him with a harder punch than the Wolverine star was expecting. On another occasion, McAvoy whacked writer Simon Kinberg with such force that his contact lens popped right out of his eye.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe Lawrence should have just banned McAvoy from the game. He sounds like the worst offender.
In the end, though, the fun-loving Lawrence had to put her hands up to the fact that she brought the plague of the punching game to the Apocalypse set. It was her idea, after all, and was all fine and dandy until someone got hurt. What she wouldn’t take the fall for, though, was “the psychosis that followed.”
She laughed, “There is a lot of testosterone in these movies, and I will not take responsibility for that!”
