Chad Michael Murray has opened up about experiencing a life-threatening health crisis when he was 15 years old.
The Freakier Friday star, 43, appeared in a special episode of Jamie Laing’s podcast Great Company on Friday 8 August, where he spoke about how his intestines became twisted, causing internal bleeding.
“I was hospitalised for two-and-a-half months, it was a lot,” he said.
The former One Tree Hill actor was apparently “in and out of consciousness” while in hospital.
“We had surgery. I had internal bleeding. I lost 50 per cent of my blood,” he revealed. “I was on my deathbed.”
His condition was so severe that his family called a priest to give him his last rites.
“I just remember seeing my father, the weakest I’d ever seen him, and a priest at the end of my bed,” Murray recalled.
“They’re talking about last rites and all that stuff, and [the nurse] gave me a blood transfusion to save my life.”
Murray then underwent a second surgery to “clean up” his internal organs, then remained in hospital while he recovered.
It was apparently that stay in hospital that, strangely, helped him in his acting career, as one of his nurses encouraged him to take up modelling.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to model. I want to be an actor. Like, I love film and television. I want to give this gift to other people.’ And she’s like, ‘Well you can segue from modelling into acting.’”
The nurse, who was a model herself, apparently then put Murray in touch with an agency who were able to book him some work.
Getting out of hospital was the “scariest thing ever”, he said, due to how much weight he had lost.
“I was a skeleton when I got out,” he said. “I remember looking in the mirror the first time going, ‘Who is that?’ I cried. I couldn’t believe that I was looking back at that guy.”
Freakier Friday, the long-awaited sequel to the 2003 comedy Freaky Friday starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, has received mixed reviews from critics.
In a two-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey remarked: “[Curtis and Lohan] are left to merely milk nostalgia out of the film’s original fanbase, while anyone who’s 18 and below gets two Chappell Roan songs and some references to ‘safe spaces’ and ‘gluten-free options’.”
Curtis responded to another negative review this week, calling the withering feedback “a tad harsh”.