Ariel Winter Reveals She Chopped off a ‘Good Portion’ of Her Thumb in Cooking Accident

Ariel Winter had quite the grisly kitchen accident recently, revealing she cut off a “good portion” of her thumb while cooking in a May 6 Access interview. The Modern Family actress revealed the gory incident happened when she was using a new knife to cook a Greek dish.

“I was trying to make Greek food, because I’m Greek,” Winter said, recalling chopping onions uneventfully before things went south. “I had chopped four onions just before I chopped this one thing. Chopped four onions and it was great — I just got new knives too. So I went to chop a peeled tomato and sliced the top part of my thumb off on a peeled tomato.” Luckily for Winter, boyfriend Luke Benward was on the scene to help. “I was so shocked that it was like more like, hyperventilating. I was like, ‘I should be crying but I — I cant believe it.’”

Winter apparently did a fair amount of damage with her knife. “I apparently sliced an artery, or something like that. And I bled so much and so we had to go to the hospital,” she recalled. Benward jumped into action and “brought the tip of [Winter’s] thumb to the hospital,” but when the plastic bag was returned to him by a nurse who didn’t clarify what was inside, they threw it away.

“It’s definitely very funny now,” Winter added, reassuring fans that she was “fine” even after losing a “good portion” of her finger and undergoing a tetanus shot to avoid getting an infection, especially looking at the incident through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic. “Obviously I was bleeding a lot but again it’s my thumb. Like so many people are in [the hospital] for so much worse and I was like, you know, I was perfectly fine. During all this, this is the least of anyone’s worries at all,” she said. “I sliced my thumb off and it’s sad, I’ll have a mildly sad-looking thumb, but it’ll be okay.”

With any adventurous cooking off the menu temporarily, Winter said she has picked up a number of hobbies to keep her busy amid quarantine. “I picked up Pokémon Go, now occasionally I will drive around for like a mile or two in my car at night and catch Pokémon. It gets me out of my house and I have my windows down and I’m doing my thing,” she revealed.