George Clooney Recalls Horrific Motorbike Accident as ‘Last Minute’ of His Life

George Clooney is opening up about his near-fatal motorbike accident in Italy in 2018. In a new interview with The Sunday Times published over the weekend, the Oscar-winner reflected on the moment he thought was the “last minute of my life,” admitting that he was “waiting for my switch to turn off” as he was rushed to a hospital in Olbia, Sardinia, after his scooter slammed head-on into a car. The accident occurred as he was on the Italian island filming Catch 22, a TV adaptation of Joseph Heller’s book of the same name.

Surveillance video of the July 10, 2018 crash showed the vehicle turned into Clooney’s lane, the impact throwing the Hollywood icon into the air before he landed on the ground. As he lay on the ground, Clooney said he was “waiting for my switch to turn off.” Opening up about the incident with the Times, the actor also recalled how a crowd of people began gathering around him, telling the outlet, “if you’re in the public eye, what you realize when you’re on the ground thinking it’s the last minute of your life is that, for some people, it’s just going to be entertainment for their Facebook page. You want to take every one and shake them.”

Despite the number of bystanders gathered around him and capturing the moment on their phones, Clooney was eventually rushed via ambulance to the John Paul II hospital in Olbia, where he was later discharged with minor injuries to his leg. Now more than three years later, Clooney has marked a major milestone: his 60th birthday. The Hollywood icon turned 60 in May, and while he admitted to the Times that he has some mixed feelings about marking another decade of life, saying that “turning 60 is a bummer,” he said, “It’s that or dead.”

This is far from the first time Clooney has opened up about the tragic motorbike accident. Clooney previously opened up about the accident when speaking to AARP the Magazine, revealing the crash forever impacted how he lives life, as he now lives with more precision and a little more care, stating, “I’m not a particularly religious guy. So I have to be skeptical about an afterlife. But as you get older, you start thinking, Well, wait a minute. It’s very hard for me to say, ‘Once you’re finished with this chassis that we’re in, you’re just done.’ My version of it is that you’re taking that one one-hundredth of a pound of energy that disappears when you die, and you’re jamming it right into the hearts of all the other people you’ve been close to.”