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Riz Ahmed said he was hospitalized for “something silent and intense” while filming the Star Wars prequel Rogue One, sharing “my body just kind of gave up on me.”
Ahmed, 42, shared that he had to “grapple with the grief but also the acceptance” around a “very intense” health experience during a conversation on Podcrushed released on Thursday, Aug. 28.
The actor was in the middle of filming 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and “my body just kind of, like, gave up on me. I was extremely exhausted,” Ahmed said, sharing that he was hospitalized “for a brief period” where he had to “really try and regain my strength.”
“It was like building myself up from scratch,” he added.
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“It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged actually,” the Relay star shared, revealing that “it really wasn’t clear” what was making him ill. “Something very silent and very intense had happened to me and I wasn’t getting better quickly.”
“For a minute, I was like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’ ” he said, describing the period as a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror and yet, also a kind of tremendous liberation and gratitude and acceptance.”
“I always think that when you’re brought to your knees, you’re halfway towards praying,” Ahmed continued, explaining that “when you’re kind of humbled in that way, when something is taken away from you, you become even more acutely aware of everything you have — and a bodily level, on a health level, you realize like, you don’t control anything, man. You don’t control a single thing. You don’t even control your body.”
For Ahmed, the health scare helped him realize “everything is a gift.”
“In the most strange way, I never felt more grateful, more at peace, more content than when I felt like I was going to lose my whole life,” he continued.
He shared that the experience inspired him to take on the role of a drummer who’s losing his hearing in Sound of Metal. “When I read the script, I was like, ‘I know what this is, you know, and I need to tell this story,’ ” Ahmed said. “The story you need finds you at the right time.”
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