Austin Butler Went Temporarily Blind Before Filming ‘Bikeriders’

Austin Butler is revealing how his busy work schedule resulted in a bizarre health scare.

The Oscar-nominated actor, 34, revealed that he temporarily went blind after jolting awake with a migraine on a flight to begin production for The Bikeriders.

“It felt like the life was being sucked from my body,” Butler recalled to Men’s Health in a profile published Tuesday. “I suddenly felt a euphoric sensation, and I actually genuinely thought I was dying.”

Butler’s symptoms might have been frightening, but he chalked the entire episode up to sleep deprivation. Eventually, his vision slowly returned, at which point the actor went to set and finished working the rest of the day.

The Caught Stealing actor has a long history of pushing his body to the brink, telling British GQ in 2022 that his body “just started shutting down” the day after he finished filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

Butler later revealed to PEOPLE that he was hospitalized and bedridden for a week with a virus that simulated appendicitis. “I had a week of downtime, where I actually ended up in the hospital,” he told the outlet at the time. “I didn’t get sick the entire time I filmed [Elvis]. But the day I finished, I ended up in the emergency room.”

In Tuesday’s Men’s Health profile, Butler addressed his history of internalizing his roles, explaining, “For a long time, I felt that it had to be a tortured process. I would come out the other side broken.” He eventually started to explore another side of performing however: “Rather than just putting parts of yourself away and trying to pretend that they don’t exist, it’s like going into the gross bits of yourself—going into the bits that you don’t want to look at—and finding a way of integrating that into the whole.”

Butler also credited actress Laura Dern with “helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side, and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesized, and metabolized. It can be therapeutic, in a way.”

Now, he is dedicated to prioritizing his health and his rest, despite his busy schedule, noting, “You don’t have to destroy the light.”