The Biggest Revelations From Madison Beer’s Book The Half of It

A Close Call

Making the music video for her song “Reckless,” one scene required a water tank and, Beer recalls, that was going to be the last scene they shot that particular night before calling it a day.

While she was exhaustedly getting ready, she writes, her manager came in and informed her that the tank had burst and all the water had flooded into the parking lot. They ended up shooting the scene later that very night in Beer’s pool at her house and everyone agreed that the underwater shots they needed were better than if they’d used that relatively confining tank.

As everyone was packing up, Beer recalls, a crew member told her that the lining of the tank was made of plastic. It ripped from the bottom and all the water sucked down like a funnel, he explained, and if she’d already been in the tank, she “‘would have been dragged under, too'” and been badly injured or stuck underwater.

Beer recalls how devastated she’d felt when the tank broke—but now she had the perfect shot, and she hadn’t been hurt in a freak accident. “I’ll never know exactly why it happened,” she writes, “but I went to bed that night feeling oddly grateful that it had.”