Jamie Foxx is looking back at the health crisis that completely changed his life — and admitting there was a time when he simply couldn’t understand why it was happening to him.
The 58-year-old actor suffered a brain bleed that led to a stroke in 2023 while filming Back in Action.
Three years later, Foxx is opening up about the experience and the difficult road back.
During Tuesday’s episode of Baby, This is Keke Palmer, Foxx said the medical emergency was something he “couldn’t make sense of.”
Even rehabilitation left him frustrated. He remembered wondering why he needed what felt like a “second chance.”
“What was wrong with my first chance? This doesn’t happen to anybody. How does it happen to me?” he recalled thinking.
Comedy became his way of coping. Foxx said he was “always joking all the time” because he “only had comedy to lean on.”
After the stroke, he even slipped into impressions of famous friends and colleagues, including Denzel Washington. The jokes sometimes made it difficult for people to know whether he was actually okay.
“That’s the only way I could find myself,” said Foxx.
“Because here’s the trueness of it. Like, when this all transpired, I went back to meet the 60 nurses that kept me alive. Because I don’t quite remember.”
His daughter, Corinne Foxx, also recalled how quickly she had to step into caretaker mode.
“When you’re in it, you don’t have time to be scared because your brain overhauls adrenaline,” she said.
“You’re in caretaking mode, and you’re never really ready to take care of your parent. You’re never ready for that moment, but when it happened, I was like, ‘I got this.’ ”
Foxx first addressed the ordeal publicly in July 2023, saying, “I did go through … I went to hell and back. And my road to recovery had some potholes as well. But I’m coming back. And I’m able to work.”
And judging by his latest reflections, he’s still finding his way forward — one joke at a time.
