Jamie Foxx is back at the mic after his recent health scare.
“It was an excruciating time to be able to open those wounds every single day for three nights,” Foxx told CBS Mornings’ Gayle King in a backstage video posted by King and the Oprah Daily account to Instagram on Monday. Foxx and his team were celebrating the final night in a three-date run of his new comedy special, “What Had Happened Was,” which was taped in Atlanta for Netflix.
“It was excruciating because the worry is what gets you,” Foxx continued. “We’ve got a great show in the room, but we don’t know what they may laugh or what they may not laugh at. Any comedian will tell you that’s the thing, the worry is the thing. Usually, when you do a stand-up special, you go out for a year and a half and work every nook and cranny, then you tape it. You don’t just show up in Atlanta and turn the camera on.”
Foxx was admitted to the hospital in April 2023 after experiencing what his daughter Corinne described as a “medical complication.” He remained out of the public eye for a month, finally breaking his silence in May with an Instagram post in which he simply stated he was “feeling blessed” by “all the love” from fans.
Various celebrity friends of Foxx like Martin Lawrence (“I hear he’s doing better”) and Kevin Hart (“a lot of progression”) shared updates on his condition over the ensuing months, but Foxx himself remained elusive. He described this special in Sept. 2024 as a way to “share his journey through a serious health scare, and after attending, King told Foxx that she’d “never seen a show where were laughing and crying at the same time.”
Reps for Foxx did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.
“It’s a personal journey,” Foxx told King, vowing, “I am never going to go through this again. My next jokes will start out, ‘knock, knock. I’ll do an hour and a half of ‘knock, knock’ jokes.” He closed out the video with a toast to this message: “Let’s sit back, watch it, and build toward a newer, brighter and healthier future.”
Foxx began opening up about his health scare in July 2023, saying he “went to hell and back,” and chose to remain private during the experience because he “didn’t want [fans] to see me with tubes running out of me and trying to figure out if I was going to make it through.”
In Dec., Foxx shared that “six months ago, I couldn’t actually walk,” joking that he “saw the tunnel; I didn’t see the light. It was hot in that tunnel too, I don’t know where I was going. ‘S—, am I going to the right place?'” Finally, in June he shared that just before the incident, he “had a bad headache” and “asked my boy for an Advil.” Next thing Foxx knew, “I was gone for 20 days. I don’t remember anything.”
Foxx will return to the big screen on Jan. 17, 2024, with Netflix’s Back in Action. He will share that return with Cameron Diaz, who retired from acting in 2018. Details about Foxx’s Netflix comedy special have not yet been released.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
