Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx has opened up about the medical emergency he faced last year, revealing that he had a brain bleed that led to a stroke.
The Hollywood star detailed the struggles he had with his health last year in a Netflix special released on Tuesday titled: “Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was.”
“It is a mystery,” he said. “We still don’t know exactly what happened to me.”
“April 11, I was having a bad headache and I asked my boy for an aspirin. And I realized quickly that when you’re in a medical emergency, your boys don’t know what the f**k to do,” he said.
“Before I could get the aspirin I went out,” he said. “I don’t remember 20 days.”
Foxx thanked his sister, who he said was “4 foot 11 of nothing but pure love,” for driving him around Atlanta to find a hospital.
They ended up at Piedmont Hospital, where a doctor told them that Foxx was having a brain bleed that had led to a stroke and that he would die without an operation, the actor said.
After the operation, doctors said that Foxx might make a full recovery “but it’s going to be the worst year of his life,” Foxx recounted.
Foxx’s family kept him out of the public eye because he was “so dizzy” that his head would bob around and his daughter was concerned that people would turn him into a internet meme if they saw his condition, he said.
On May 4, he remembers waking up in a wheelchair and not being able to walk, and reacting in shock when his friend told him he’d had a stroke.
“Jamie Foxx don’t get strokes,” the actor remembered saying.
He was then flown to Chicago for rehab, where he says he was told to drop the “arrogant” act if he wanted to make a full recovery.
The actor was hospitalized in April 2023 after having a then-undisclosed health crisis while filming a Netflix film in Atlanta.
At the time of his hospitalization, his daughter Corinne Foxx said on social media that her father had suffered a “medical complication,” but those close to him largely stayed tight-lipped about the actor’s condition, in keeping with his penchant for privacy.
In July 2023, Foxx posted an Instagram video update in which he addressed the speculation about what led to his hospitalization, although he did not reveal details of what happened.
“I know a lot of people were waiting or wanting to hear updates but to be honest with you, I just didn’t want you to see me like that, man,” he said in the video. “I want you to see me laughing, having a good time, partying, cracking a joke, doing a movie, television show. I didn’t want you to see me with tubes running out of me and trying to figure out if I was gonna make it through.”
Foxx shared another health update on his verified social media in August 2023.
“You’re looking at a man who is thankful… finally startin’ to feel like myself…” he wrote at the time. “It’s been an unexpected dark journey… but I can see the light.”
This past summer, in a video shared to TikTok, the “Ray” actor told a crowd of well-wishers that his issue began with a “bad headache” and was then “gone for 20 days.” In that video, he was seen sharing that he did not “remember anything.”