The Loney Island and Seth Meyers podcast is usually one of the funniest podcasts around, but not this week: The latest episode began with The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone disclosing that he shattered his pelvis and suffered a detached sacrum in a ladder accident at his farmhouse in Connecticut. He added that doctors had told him he would be able to walk again in “three to six months.”
Taccone, director of MacGruber and co-director of PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping with Lonely Island colleague Akiva Schaffer, explained that he was stringing borrowed lights while standing on a rickety ladder borrowed from a neighbor — though the neighbor had advised, “hey, this ladder is bad — like, you shouldn’t use this ladder.”
Taccone said he felt the ladder give way, and had time to fear for his life. He said he fell about 20 feet.
“I literally had enough time as I’m falling to be like, ‘I’m gonna die,'” Taccone recounted. “So I drop, I look over, I see the yard, and I’m like, ‘This is gonna hurt a lot,’ and I fall straight on my butt, taking all the impact on on my butt.”
The timing was especially bad because it was his daughter’s birthday. He called out for his wife, fellow director Marielle Heller, to summon an ambulance, and he was taken to a hospital. Once there he received surgery.
“It turns out that I have shattered my pelvis on my left hand side. Like, pretty, pretty badly. My sacrum has detached from my spine,” he added.
Taccone said he was also told that his injuries could have been even worse.
“My doctor came in this morning and was like, ‘Oh yeah. If you had hit your heels — if you’d landed on both your heels — that would have been 10 times worse.’ I’m like, ’10 times worse? I didn’t know pain at that level was possible.”
Meyers and Lonely Island partners Schaffer and Andy Samberg shared their sympathy, and gratitude that the outcome wasn’t even worse. You can listen to the entire episode here.
Jorma Taccone on His Recovery Plan
Taccone added that he is expecting to go through “acute rehab,” but that doctors told him he would be able to walk again in “three to six months.”
“I’m just gonna have to fight through the pain,” he said.
“And, no, it’s definitely no joke,” he added, before drily quipping: “I know this is not the funniest way to start a podcast.”
Taccone, who also co-starred in PopStar, as well as the movies Hot Rod and Land of the Lost, rose with his Lonely Island friends to fame for Digital Shorts including “J— in My Pants” and “Jack Sparrow” when all worked for Saturday Night Live.
He recently directed Over Your Dead Body, a thriller starring Jason Segel and Samara Weaving that has been acquired by IFC Films.
It has been a busy summer for the Lonely Island crew: Taccone had just shot a commercial with Stepanie Beatriz, Samberg’s Brookyn Nine-Nine castmate, when he suffered the ladder fall, and Schaffer scored a hit with the Naked Gun reboot released last month and starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. Samberg stars in the new season of the animated series Digman and co-stars in the new film The Roses.
Additionally, the podcast got wide media attention when Meyers beloved family dog, Frisbee, died last month, because of a long-running joke about Samberg’s hatred for the dog.
We wish Taccone a speedy and full recovery and thank him and the entire Lonely Island team for many laughs during our complicated times.
Main image: Jorma Taccone at the 2022 premiere for The People We Hate at the Wedding at the Regency Village Theatre. Photo by Paul Smith, courtesy of Shutterstock.