Jamie Foxx Thought He Was Being Pranked When He Woke Up From His Coma

Jamie Foxx thought he was being pranked when waking up from his coma.

On a recent episode of the Graham Norton Show, the 57-year-old Oscar-winner recalled his first thoughts after coming out of a coma following a health scare in early 2023.

“I had a bad situation happen, but I'm back now,” Foxx told Norton, alongside his Back in Action co-star Cameron Diaz and Wicked stars Michelle Yeoh and Jonathan Bailey. “When something bad happens you need people that really, really care about you and love you to get you through that.”

Foxx recalled that he suffered from a brain bleed that led to a stroke. Twenty days later, he woke up with no recollection of what happened and in disbelief of his condition.

“I said, ‘What? Where is Ashton Kutcher? Am I being Punk’d? So when it settled in, I was like … I really gotta try to try to get back, you know, and the only way I did get back was kind of being funny. I said in my stand up, if I could stay funny, you know, I could stay alive,” he said.

Apparently it didn’t take long for Foxx’s sense of humor to come back to him.

“When they would come check on me. I was always telling jokes to the point to where they thought that something was wrong with me … I was never myself, I would always be somebody else. And for like days I was Denzel [Washington].”

Foxx shared details about his private health battle for the first time last month during his Netflix special, What Had Happened Was.

During an emotional moment in the standup special, Foxx recalled experiencing a bad headache in April 2023 and visiting a doctor who tried to give him a shot and send him on his way. Foxx’s sister insisted on seeking a second opinion before meeting another doctor who gave him a proper diagnosis.

“He said, ‘He’s having a brain bleed that’s led to a stroke,’” Foxx told the crowd during the Netflix special. “Damn. Me. Me, man. Me. Here’s the thing, when you dream about what you wanna be in life, you don’t dream tragedy. You dream everything is good. … You don’t dream that something could go wrong, but when something does go wrong, you need a sister, four-foot-eleven, full of nothing but love.”

However, it wouldn’t be a Jamie Foxx standup special without injecting some humor into a pretty dark, life-altering situation.

“I saw the tunnel. I didn’t see the light,” Foxx said. “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?” he joked, referencing Diddy. “I’m fucking around. But if it was Puffy he had, like, a flaming bottle of Johnson…Naw, I’m just kidding.”