Countless comedies have been marketed as being so funny they’ll split audiences at the sides, an injury that would land them in the hospital if it were a literal claim. 

Charlize Theron wasn’t quite cleaved in twain, but she did spend the better part of a week laid up after watching a particularly riotous movie.

That’s the kind of marketing any film would love to be associated with: ‘The comedy so hilarious it sent an Academy Award winner directly to the emergency room’.

That said, it wasn’t the onscreen antics that were solely responsible for Theron’s malady, but they didn’t do her any favours, either.

2005’s terrible sci-fi action thriller Æon Flux is a movie Theron would like to forget for several different reasons.

It was the worst-reviewed entry in her entire filmography, it tanked spectacularly at the box office, and she knew it was going to be “a fucking flop” from the moment she signed on, which didn’t make for the most enjoyable or memorable experience.

Not only that, but she was almost killed when a stunt sequence went horribly wrong, with shooting suspended for almost a month when a freak accident left her millimetres away from being completely paralysed.

Once Æon Flux was over, it was the kind of movie she’d never want to think about again until the injury reared its head under the most unexpected circumstances.

A year after the dismal genre flick was released and Theron was under the impression her injury woes were behind her, she and her friends headed out to catch the latest headline-grabbing comedy from Sacha Baron Cohen, only for the actor to fall short of making it to the credits.

“A few of us went to see Borat, and halfway through that movie, I laughed so hard that my neck locked up, and an ambulance had to take me to the hospital,” she told Seth Meyers. “I was in the hospital for five days. And I’ve never finished the movie.”

That’s perfectly understandable because why would Theron want to finish the film that aggravated her neck injury and put her right back in the hospital?

Then again, the buzziest and most talked-about comedy of 2006 cleared a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office, notched an Academy Award nomination, and earned Cohen a Golden Globe, so the fear of missing out may have played on her mind.

It was hard to go anywhere that year without hearing somebody either quoting Borat or making an impression of the intrepid Kazakh journalist, and if Theron was in earshot, it had the potential to give her flashbacks to her failed attempt to watch the movie that compounded her pre-existing misery and re-aggravated the injury she thought was in her past.