Since Jamie Foxx’s hospitalization in April 2023 for undisclosed causes, the Oscar-winning actor, singer, and comic has remained largely out of the highlight, leaving his medical situation shrouded in thriller. But in his new Netflix particular, What Had Happened Was (now streaming on Netflix), Foxx reveals the harrowing particulars of the debilitating stroke that left him on the sting of loss of life — and his arduous highway to restoration.
“I used to be combating for my life, however I’m right here proper in entrance of you,” a tearful Foxx tells a cheering Atlanta crowd after being launched by his daughter, actress Corinne Foxx. “If I dance all night time, don’t thoughts me. I’m completely satisfied to be alive.”
Foxx explains that he wished to movie the particular in Atlanta as a result of it’s the place he received began doing stand-up and since the medical doctors and nurses of Piedmont Atlanta Hospital had been the primary to look after him after his stroke. At the time, Foxx was in Atlanta filming his upcoming Netflix film Back in Action co-starring Cameron Diaz.
“Atlanta saved my life,” he repeats to the viewers all through the particular, which has already been nominated for a Golden Globe Award within the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television class.
Here are key takeaways from the efficiency:
His “thriller sickness” began with a headache.
On April 11, 2023, Foxx was hit with a nasty headache and requested a pal for an aspirin. But earlier than he was capable of take it, he says he “went out.” He doesn’t keep in mind the next 20 days, however Foxx says he was informed by family and friends members that the primary physician he noticed gave him a cortisone shot and despatched him residence. When his sister, Deidra Dixon, went to go to him she insisted he get additional medical care as a result of one thing didn’t appear proper.
Dixon drove him to Piedmont Hospital, the place one other physician speculated Foxx was having a mind bleed that led to a stroke. The physician operated on Foxx in what the actor says was a near-death expertise. “He might be able to make a full restoration, nevertheless it’s gonna be the worst 12 months of his life,” Foxx tearfully recounts the physician telling his sister.
When Foxx snapped again to actuality 20 days later, he was in a rehabilitation middle in Chicago and was confused to seek out himself in a wheelchair.
Foxx initially refused to take part in remedy to get higher.
In an emotional retelling, Foxx remembers being dizzy, pissed off, and stubbornly proof against each bodily and psychological remedy. “I’m Jamie Foxx. I don’t want nothing. I don’t need to see no therapist,” he says. “They say, ‘You received a second probability.’ I don’t desire a second probability. What’s incorrect with my first probability?”
Eventually, Foxx says, the rehab middle despatched in a nurse named Holly who pushed him to get away from bed and achieve perspective on his scenario. She reminded him that whereas he had the prospect to get higher, there have been individuals who weren’t going to make it out of the ability he was in.
PARRISH LEWIS/NETFLIX
Foxx’s humorousness is properly intact.
Throughout his time in rehab, Foxx says he made jokes with the nurses and his different guests, telling himself, “If I can keep humorous, I can keep alive.”
While he sheds loads of tears as he speaks candidly about his well being criss, Foxx additionally leans into his comedy roots with impressions of Wesley Snipes, Dave Chappelle, Jay-Z, Mike Tyson, and even Donald Trump. Withing the primary couple of minutes of the particular, he additionally nods to the sexual assault, harassment, and intercourse trafficking allegations in opposition to Sean Combs.
“The web stated Puffy tried to kill me. I do know what you’re considering: ‘Did he?’” Foxx says. “Hell no, I left them events early. I used to be out by 9. ‘Something don’t look proper. It’s slippery in right here’” (a reference to the greater than 1,000 bottles of child oil that had been present in Diddy’s residence raid as part of Homeland Security’s investigation).
He returns to Diddy later within the particular as he describes his “oddly peaceable” near-death expertise: “I noticed the tunnel. I didn’t see the sunshine, I used to be in a tunnel, although. It was scorching in that tunnel. [I thought], ‘Shit am I going to the incorrect place on this motherfucker?’ ’Cause I regarded on the finish of the tunnel and I assumed I noticed the satan. Or was that Puffy?”
Foxx celebrates how his household “held me the fuck down” throughout this scary second in his life.
While he was going by his stroke, reminiscence loss, and subsequent restoration, Foxx says he was absent from the highlight as a result of his sister and his older daughter tried their greatest to maintain him out of the general public eye. “They didn’t need you to see me like that, and I didnt need you to see me like that,” he explains. “I wished you to see me like this.” The comic is dropped at tears explaining that he doesn’t need to surprise who can be by his aspect in the course of the worst of occasions, as a result of he’s lived by it.
Before leaving the stage, Foxx additionally brings out his youthful daughter, 14-year-old Anelise Bishop, who performs her guitar for the viewers. Foxx says he was informed that for the primary 15 days following his stroke, his vitals had been “uncontrolled” and issues had been very “contact and go.” But when Bishop snuck into his hospital room and performed her guitar, the nurses had been “baffled” to see his vitals go down. “You know what I discovered? It was God in that guitar,” he says. “That’s my religious defibrillator.”
Bishop strums alongside whereas Foxx performs a dialog he had with God throughout this tumultuous time. After she finishes her track, Foxx takes a seat at a piano to take the viewers by a protracted checklist of his accomplishments, together with a efficiency of his Grammy-nominated track “Slow Jamz.”
We nonetheless don’t actually know all the things about what had occurred to Jamie Foxx.
While Foxx addresses his stroke and the gravity of his medical situation, some particulars stay opaque, together with what prompted the occasion within the first place. Once in surgical procedure, medical doctors had been unable to seek out the mind bleed they’d suspected was the supply of the issue. Combined with Foxx’s extreme and seemingly everlasting reminiscence loss surrounding the incident, he could by no means have a full image of the well being disaster that just about killed him.
