By now, I'm assuming we've all seen the clip of Madonna's epic, onstage fall at the BRIT Awards on Feb. 25, or, in the case of some of you, watched it on loop too many times to count. You know who you are. But before you get too carried away exalting in someone else's embarrassment, you should know that Madonna spoke up about the incident during an interview on Britain's The Jonathan Ross Show , and she said she actually really hurt herself. So feel free to keep giggling about it, but just know that we're all monsters.
As we could all see from the clip, the incident occurred when Madonna's dancers tugged the Armani cape she was wearing, pulling her backward off the stage by her neck. Not a fun way to fall, and she hit the ground hard. However, she says she wasn't injured in the way everyone thinks:
I didn't hurt my butt, I hurt my head. I know how to fall. I've fallen off my horse many times, and I tucked, and I have good core strength… but the thing is, I had a little bit of a whiplash, and I smacked the back of my head. So, there was a man standing over me with a flashlight until about 3 a.m. making sure that I was still compos mentis.
Yikes! I don't think a lot of us realized that there was a potential head injury involved, mostly because Madonna hopped on Instagram pretty much right after and reassured everyone that she was "fine".
It's probably for the best that fans didn't know that, because they would've been freaking out even more than they were already. Which was a lot, given how far she fell and how hard she hit the ground.
It was a horrible nightmare, because I like to be amazing. Seriously, I rehearse and I rehearse and I rehearse, so that when I do the show it's effortless and I create magic, and I did the opposite. I actually created a horror show for everyone.
Not everyone realized what they were watching was a horror show, though. Some of them thought it was all planned, because the fall corresponded to a theme in the lyrics that Madonna was singing at the time:
Some people actually thought it was a stunt, based off the "Living for Love" lyrics, which include lines like, 'Took me to heaven and let me fall down … Lifted me up, and watched me stumble.' I'm never writing lyrics like that again! The universe was trying to teach me a lesson, I guess.
I mean yeah, that's like how they say the worst possible time to have a heart attack is during a game of Charades, because everyone will think it's part of it and keep guessing what you're trying to act out. What a nightmare. And in this situation, Madonna says it was set up to go that way from the start:
I'm a creature of habit, and I rehearse everything – everything, everything, everything – and I was thrown a wrench at the very beginning of my entrance. I was told to tie my cape and start much further back than we had rehearsed. Everybody was worried that my cape was going to slide off because it's quite heavy, so they tied it really tight around my neck … So here I am marching in like a queen, and I got to the top of the stairs and I pulled my silky string, and it would not come undone. And my two lovely Japanese dancers basically strangled me off the stage. I had a choice: I could either be strangled or fall with the cape, and I fell.
Um, yeah, that was probably a good call. Fall or die? Definitely fall.
Especially when your decision leaves us with a Vine as amazing as the one above. (I'm awful.)
