Jenifer Lewis is opening up about her restoration course of after a current brush with dying.
In a brand new interview with Tamron Corridor on her daytime discuss present, the 67-year-old Black-ish actress stated that she considers herself fortunate to be alive after falling 10 toes from the balcony of a lodge and right into a dry ravine throughout a visit to Africa. Lewis first detailed the horrific incident in a tell-all interview with Good Morning America‘s Robin Roberts in March.
ET obtained an unique clip from Lewis’ upcoming look on Tamron, which exhibits the Contemporary Prince of Bel-Air actress choking again tears as she makes an attempt to inform the 53-year-old discuss present host the extent of her rehabilitation following the traumatic fall.
“Oh guys, I could not keep in mind,” Lewis says earlier than slicing off abruptly and asking for a second to gather herself. “In Nairobi, after they requested me to stroll, you already know the parallel bars, I could not keep in mind the right way to stroll… ‘How do you try this?'”
As she continued, the I Love That For You star held again sobs whereas describing the immense ache — each bodily and emotional — of getting to start out from scratch. She explains that in these early weeks after the autumn, she could not even keep in mind the right way to put one foot in entrance of the opposite. On high of the inherent battle to push her physique bodily, Lewis shared that she was simply as robust on herself mentally.
“I sat down within the wheelchair, and I sobbed. And I heard myself say, ‘You’ll stand up, you’ll stand up and you’ll stroll or I will kill you myself,'” she stated by tears. “‘You stand up and also you stroll, come on, child.’ And I walked.”
Lewis’ interview airs on Tamron on Friday, April 5. Watch the unique clip within the participant under:
Simply final month, Lewis opened up for the primary time concerning the fall to Roberts, 63, telling her concerning the horrifying expertise of dropping from the balcony at nighttime and worrying that nobody would discover her or assist her in time.
“Nothing would transfer. So, I laid there, I stated, ‘Transfer your physique, child. Come on, Jenny. Transfer your physique,'” she informed Roberts. “My final thought, as a result of I’m Jenifer Lewis, was, ‘What a headline.'”
Fortunately, regardless of discovering it “exhausting to even take an enormous breath to scream,” she was capable of get assist and was taken to the hospital and handled for her extreme accidents. Lewis informed the outlet that whereas the final yr of her life in restoration has been “the toughest” yr she has ever confronted, she solely will get stronger daily and needs to make use of her personal story to encourage others.
“Whether or not it is falling out of a relationship, falling out together with your dad and mom, falling down bodily, any fall, I wanna inform the world, ‘Oh sure, you may stand up,” she stated.
ET final spoke with Lewis at PaleyFest again in 2022 as she closed the guide on the Black-ish chapter of her life, which took up almost a decade. Within the hit ABC collection, Lewis performed Ruby Johnson, the mom of Anthony Anderson’s character, Andre Johnson.
On the time, she stated that of all of the issues she would miss concerning the Emmy-nominated collection — which additionally starred Tracee Ellis Ross, Yara Shahidi, Marcus Scribner, Miles Brown and Marsai Martin — it could be her on-screen relations, specifically her character’s grandchildren, that she would miss probably the most.
“I am gonna miss the children. I used to be simply telling Marcus how I swung them round that first week I got here in and now they have mustaches and all the pieces that goes with it,” she shared. “And they’re lovely, all of them are lovely. They’re proficient, they’re good folks — that is what I am happy with, they’re good children.”
Black-ish ran from 2014 to 2022 and spawned two profitable spinoffs, Grown-ish and Combined-ish.
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