They say the show must go on, but no one would have faulted Guy Fieri if he’d halted production after snapping a leg muscle “literally in half” while filming the upcoming Food Network competition series Flavortown Food Fight.
After revealing his leg injury in November, Fieri elaborated on the accident in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, saying he suffered the injury after slipping down a set of stairs on the Flavortown Food Fight set.
“I’m kind of halfway doing the splits going down the stairs, about a three-foot drop, and then it just took that leg and compressed it, snapped my quad muscle on the center of my leg in half,” he said. “Literally in half.”
Fieri’s first impulse was to continue filming, but the crew had other ideas. “The paramedic on set came and looked at it and could see the dent, because the muscle was gone,” he recalled. “She goes, ‘You need to go to the hospital.’ But I said, ‘OK, well, tape me up. Let’s go finish the show.’ Because we were right in the middle of the show.”
The paramedic and other Flavortown Food Fight crew members insisted that Fieri head to the hospital, but the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives host wouldn’t budge. “I got 125 people on set. I got two chefs [who] are losing their minds in the middle of this competition. We gotta get this done,” he said.
Adrenaline got Fieri through the rest of that day of filming, he said, and when he finally got to the hospital and got an MRI, a doctor told him he had a “full-blown” injury and needed surgery immediately. Fieri, however, still had his Food Network duties on his mind. “I’m like, ‘What does immediately mean?’” he asked the doc.
“The doctor was like, ‘Yeah, why would you listen to me? Why would you go put it up and get off?’ I said, ‘Well, you said I can’t do anything worse,’” Fieri told EW, laughing.
The restaurateur ultimately did undergo surgery and returned to work three days later. Fieri said he had to wear pants with Velcro in the back and lean on stationary objects like street signs and picnic benches during filming, but he got the remaining 12 episodes of Flavortown Food Fight in the can.
Now Fieri has a new appreciation for his body, he said. “You look at people that have disabilities and realize, we take a lot of things for granted. Folks that are on crutches and stuff, you know, the next time you see somebody on crutches, maybe clear a little bit of a path. Open the door for them.”
Flavortown Food Fight, Series Premiere, Wednesday, March 4, 9/8c, Food Network, Streaming Next Day on HBO Max and Discovery+