Jamie Foxx revealed his nurse told him that he had a 5 percent chance of surviving the medical emergency that almost took his life in 2023.
Foxx attended the Golden Globes red carpet on Sunday, Jan. 5, and spoke with Variety's Marc Malkin about his major health scare and getting back on track. "When you dream about what you wanna be, you don't dream tragedy," Foxx said. "You dream the greatest life in the world, but when tragedy happens you need somebody there that really loves you. My daughter Anelise and my daughter Corinne stepped up."
Malkin asked Foxx how scared he was during the experience, and he admitted he was "very scared" during the roughest patch of the health scare. "This girl in Atlanta, one of my nurses shout out to her, she says, 'Jamie, you're a five-percenter,'" he continued. "I said, 'What does that mean?' [She said,] 'Less than 5 percent of people that have what you have walk out of here. But when I saw that it was you, I rolled my sleeves up.' I said, 'Well thank you so much.' She says, 'Why you thanking me? You're not special, I roll my sleeves up for everybody that comes in here.'"
Foxx got candid about his medical emergency in his Netflix standup special What Had Happened Was, which debuted on the streamer last month. He shared that he suffered from a brain bleed that led to a stroke, which he admitted started as a "bad headache" that ultimately progressed to him waking up 20 days later without knowing what happened to him.
“I saw the tunnel. I didn’t see the light” Foxx said in the special, later cracking a joke about the charges against Diddy. “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? I’m fucking around. But if it was Puffy he had, like, a flaming bottle of Johnson…Naw, I’m just kidding.”
Foxx was nominated for the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television award at the Golden Globes on Sunday, but the award went to Ali Wong for her Single Lady stand-up special.