Jackie Chan is in a class of his own when it comes to putting his body on the line for his roles. The only other living actor who comes close is maybe Tom Cruise, but Cruise doesn't even scratch the catalog of Chan's stunts.

Jackie Chan became a cultural icon for his kung-fu action movies that more often than not involved him performing his own stunts even when that meant putting his well-being in danger. The list of potentially deadly stunts Jackie Chan performed during his career is long, and the "deadliest" stunt isn't what we're here to debate, that we'll leave to the comments.

The stunt in question features Chan jumping from a ledge and sliding down a pole fitted with lights before lading through a glass roof some forty feet below. The sequence was filmed for the movie Police Story and was shot on fifteen different cameras and was such an incredible shot that the movie included it with three separate angles. After the scene, Chan was whisked away to another shoot before he collapsed from exhaustion. He suffered second-degree burns on his hands and was lucky not to have been injured more severely.