When you spend a career throwing heavy leather, sometimes it can be difficult to pull your punches.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars alongside Conor McGregor in the remake of the 1980s cult classic ‘Road House’ set for release on the Amazon Prime platform this week, spends much of the film in direct conflict with McGregor’s character Knox — and as such, some of the action scenes led to Gyllenhaal accidentally feeling the Irishman’s much-vaunted power.

“We had, actually, by mistake, he clocked me in the face,” the actor said to Jimmy Fallon in an appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ this week.

“We would do a take where we were like fighting, and fake fighting, fake fighting, and then we’d go watch the monitor to see it back, to see what worked, and he was always great with me,” Gyllenhaal explained. “He would show me, tell me to do things, and like, ‘Oh, you know, turn your head, move a little bit more this way to try and make it look more real,’ and it was late because we shot a lot of these fight scenes at night.

“So it was like 3 a.m., and he was talking to me really close, and he was like, ‘Yeah, like that left hook looks good, but then when you do it like, boom,’ and he hit me by mistake. It was almost like… and I was like, ‘Oh!’ And he was like, ‘Oh!’”

Gyllenhaal also revealed that the film’s producers had pursued McGregor — who has previously rejected numerous opportunities for a silver screen debut — for quite a while before he finally agreed to the role.

“When I got word that he was going to be doing it, I was super psyched, because they chased him for a long time to play the part,” he said. “But then I got totally terrified and I thought, ‘Oh God, I actually have to fake fight this guy and I got to look like I can.’ I stay in pretty good shape, but we trained for two months pretty hard — grappling, and a lot of MMA.”

‘Road House’ is released by Amazon Prime on March 21.

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