George Clooney is one of the best actors to ever exist in the entertainment industry, and that’s a given. His sheer determination to go to extremes just to play his role right is what makes him a distinctive actor as compared to others, but sometimes, his bravery backfired on him, and at those times, it was no fun at all.
All of Clooney’s confident charm (or at least most of it) was in utter confusion and bewilderment after his one torture scene during the shoot of his $94 million 2005 superhit movie Syriana left him with his head cracked open and a beyond severely injured spine which made him take insanely strong medication and go to therapy to recover.
George Clooney’s Intense Spine Injury While Shooting Syriana (2005)
Days before the shoot wrapped up for Syriana, George Clooney got into a terrible accident while filming a torture scene. This incident had his head split open along with a serious spine injury that couldn’t be identified and diagnosed for over three weeks.
In an interview with Rolling Stone later on, the Ocean’s Eleven actor shared his painful experience throughout. He said:
“I was at a point where I thought, ‘I can’t exist like this. I can’t actually live.’ I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and for a short three-week period, I started to think, ‘I may have to do something drastic about this.’”
Continuing, he explained his cryptic statement:
“You start to think in terms of, you don’t want to leave a mess, so go in the garage, go in the car, start the engine. It seems like the nicest way to do it, but I never thought I’d get there. See, I was in a place where I was trying to figure out how to survive.”
During another interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Clooney further explained how he even contemplated suicide just to get out of the terrible pain he was in.
“I thought I was going to die. Talk to any doctor about a CSF — a cerebral/spinal fluid leak — and they’ll tell you it’s way up there on the pain scale. There was this whole coming to terms with [mortality].”
However, thanks to Lisa Kudrow finally taking him to her neurologist brother, George Clooney’s spine injury was finally identified and thus, further recovery process started.
George Clooney’s Not-So-Pleasant Experience Of Recovering From His Spine Injury
As it turns out, George Clooney had torn his dura aka the outermost layer of the spinal cord. But that wasn’t all. Continuing in the interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he shared what further diagnosing found:
“I had a two-and-a-half-inch tear in the middle of my back and a half-inch tear in my neck. […] But what we didn’t understand was how big the holes were.”
Thankfully, finally, by Christmas, he was able to undergo a nine-hour successful surgery. But that wasn’t the end either: that was just the beginning of the excruciating recovery experience which included strong painkiller medicines.
“Then you start on a series of painkillers. They’ll hand you a giant tub of Vicodin, which is not a good drug for me; I had a lot of stomach pain and I really didn’t like the high it gave me. Then there were a lot of other drugs. I was on morphine for a while, which created this horrible anxiety where I really thought I was in trouble.”
Throughout the pain, the ER star realized he wasn’t battling his injury just physically, but psychologically as well.
“It’s been a long recovery,” Clooney said. “I had to accept that I’m going to beat this on a very different level, almost psychological. I went to a pain-management guy whose idea was, ‘You can’t mourn for how you used to feel, because you’re never going to feel that way again.’ Meaning, you wake up with the worst hangover ever, and that’s your day, and you have to come to terms with it.”
Although his pain still returns to him sometimes despite recovery, George Clooney doesn’t complain about it anymore but rather pays more attention to subsiding the pain or patiently enduring it instead of making a fuss about it, thanks to the pain-management guy’s advice and his other life experiences.
Source: Rolling Stone | The Hollywood Reporter
