12 Days of Christmas: Five Fun Facts About "Die Hard"

Today's featured film is the 1988 action classic (yes, it's a Christmas movie!), "Die Hard."

1. The newly-built headquarters of 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles was actually used for exterior shots of the Nakatomi building, where terrorists invade a company holiday party on Christmas Eve. In fact, most Angelenos still refer to the building as Nakatomi Plaza.

2. John McClane has hobbit feet? In order for Bruce Willis to run through glass shards in his bare feet, he wore special rubber shoes designed to look like his own feet. If you look closely, they look bizarrely large in some scenes.

3. Alan Rickman's shock when his character Hans Gruber plunges to his death from the top of the building is his real reaction! Director John McTiernan instructed a stuntman to release Rickman from a 21-foot high model on the count of two instead of three, in order to get genuine surprise. Well it worked ... and ticked off Rickman in the process.

(Fun bonus fact: This was Rickman's first movie!)

4. John McClane's grimy undershirt from the film now resides in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution! Willis donated the artifact in 2007, in addition to a poster from the the flick and a prop police badge and script from the 2007 sequel, "Live Free or Die Hard."

5. The film left a lasting impression on Bruce Willis -- in the form of making him 2/3 deaf!

In order to get loud bangs in the flick, the director used special blanks in the guns. During the “table scene,” Willis shoots a bad guy from under a conference room table, but the gun was too close to his ear. The result? Permanent loss of hearing on his left side.