During his recent appearance on CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast, Matthew Modine, who played Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley in The Dark Knight Rises, revealed that his character's death was "so violent" and "sickening" that it needed to be cut to prevent the film from receiving an NC-17 rating.
"All it does is, it just cuts, and I'm on the ground, dead. But it was so violent," Modine said, before getting into graphic detail of what really became of Foley. "The guy that was doubling me got hit by the car. They put a plexiglass thing on the front of [the car] and he got hit. They had ropes to pull him into the air, but he went up and they dropped him from about 15 feet, and the sound of his body hitting the cobblestone street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, it was sickening."
People wondered why Foley’s death was limited to the sight of his bullet-riddled body lying on the ground when set footage showed that he had suffered a different, more heroic fate when he shoved someone out of harm’s way before being ran over by a Tumbler.
When pressed about the scene change, Modine previously said he considered his real fate to be an "epic spoiler."
He never admitted that if the Nolan kept a scene as violent as that one, Dark Knight Rises would've needed to carry an NC-17 rating.
"I remember I looked at Christopher Nolan when we shot it and his face was white," he recalled while on ReelBlend. "He was like, 'Ok, let’s move on. We got that.’ But it was like, ‘Oh my God, is that guy going to get up? Is he okay?’ But [Nolan] said that if he would have put it in the movie, it would’ve got an NC-17 rating because it was so violent."
