Jamie Foxx has opened up about his first moments coming out of his coma.
During a new Graham Norton Show appearance, the 57-year-old Academy Award winner talked about waking up after his serious health issue in early 2023.
“I had a bad situation happen, but I’m back now,” Foxx shared with Norton, sitting alongside Back in Action costar Cameron Diaz and Wicked cast members Michelle Yeoh and Jonathan Bailey. “When something bad happens you need people that really, really care about you and love you to get you through that.”
He explained he’d suffered a brain bleed leading to a stroke. When he woke up 20 days later, he was confused and couldn’t remember what happened.
“I said, ‘What? Where is Ashton Kutcher? Am I being Punk’d? So when it settled in, I was like … I really gotta try to try to get back, you know, and the only way I did get back was kind of being funny. I said in my stand up, if I could stay funny, you know, I could stay alive,” he recalled.
His humor came rushing back pretty quick.
“When they would come check on me. I was always telling jokes to the point to where they thought that something was wrong with me … I was never myself, I would always be somebody else. And for like days I was Denzel [Washington].”
Foxx first shared his private health story last month in his Netflix special What Had Happened Was.
During an emotional part of his standup, he remembered getting a bad headache in April 2023 and seeing a doctor who tried to just give him a shot and send him home. His sister pushed for another opinion, leading to a doctor who spotted the real problem.
“He said, ‘He’s having a brain bleed that’s led to a stroke,'” Foxx told the audience during the Netflix special. “Damn. Me. Me, man. Me. Here’s the thing, when you dream about what you wanna be in life, you don’t dream tragedy. You dream everything is good. … You don’t dream that something could go wrong, but when something does go wrong, you need a sister, four-foot-eleven, full of nothing but love.”
But true to form, Foxx lightened up the heavy moment with some jokes.
“I saw the tunnel. I didn’t see the light,” Foxx said. “I was in that tunnel though. It was hot in that tunnel. Shit, am I goin’ to the wrong place in this motherfucker? Because I looked at the end of the tunnel and I thought I saw the devil-like, ‘Come on, n***a.'”
“Or is that Puffy?” he cracked, referencing Diddy. “I’m fucking around. But if it was Puffy he had, like, a flaming bottle of Johnson…Naw, I’m just kidding.”
