James McAvoy Reveals He ‘Nearly D!ed’ After ‘Botched’ Medical Procedure

The actor, 47, said he was hospitalized for two to three weeks after the health scare

James McAvoy. Credit :Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty

James McAvoy revealed he almost died after a past “botched” procedure.

The 47-year-old actor appeared on the Monday, Oct. 12 episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast and opened up about his near-death experience and struggling to get back to work.

“I had a lung puncture because they saw a shadow in my lung, so they wanted to biopsy it to see if it was cancer, which it wasn’t, which was great,” he said.

“But that was botched, and I nearly died,” he shared. “I was at home two days later, my lungs just collapsed in bed one night, and I was on my own as well, so it was crazy.”

McAvoy said that he was hospitalized for “two or three weeks” as doctors struggled to get his health back on track. He developed an infection and after initial treatments failed, he required a more invasive procedure.

“They tried everything to clean [it] out — nothing was working,” he recalled. “So they were like, ‘We’re going to cut you open, big style. Go in with, like, dish soap, basically, and just clean you out, scoop it all out.’”

The actor’s health scare came in 2017 right before he filmed Glass, the sequel to 2016’s hit psychological thriller Split. In the film, McAvoy reprises his role as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man who develops 24 different personalities, including the Beast, a cannibal with superhuman abilities.

James McAvoy.Gareth Cattermole/Getty

McAvoy explained to Shepard that after recovering, he had to quickly get in shape for the movie.

“Unlike Split, I was the Beast [for] most of the movie, and I was just outside in broad daylight as well,” he said. “So I was like, ‘I’m really going to need to do the real thing. I’m going to need to go for it.’ I remember saying, like, ‘You’re going to get me a trainer.’ … I’m going to need somebody that can make [me] look like a Greek f—ing figure from mythology.”

“The guy that worked with me was amazing,” he continued. “For the first four weeks, he rehabilitated me. I could walk, but I couldn’t run, couldn’t cycle, couldn’t jog. … He did a lot of rehabilitation and functional movement, and then put the pounds on me really fast.”