Oscar-Nominated Actor Discloses ‘Super Scary and Intense’ Hospitalization

One Academy Award-nominated actor recently revealed he was hospitalized during the filming of a Star Wars movie.

British actor Riz Ahmed was in production on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story when he hospitalized for an “intense” and “prolonged” illness, he said on a recent episode of You star Penn Badgley’s podcast Podcrushed.

“Around the time of taking on Sound of Metal, I had had a very intense kind of health-related experience myself, where I had to grapple with the grief but also the acceptance around that,” he said. “And basically, I was in the middle of filming Star Wars, and my body just kind of, like, gave up on me. I was extremely exhausted, I was hospitalized for a brief period. I had to really try to recreate my strength. It was like building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually.”

He initially didn’t get “better quickly” after the “sudden” debilitating illness, “and for a minute, I was like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’ It really wasn’t clear.” He described the situation as a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror and, yet, also a kind of tremendous liberation and gratitude and acceptance.”

The eventual outcome of the illness was what drew him to the script for 2019’s Sound of Metal, a musical drama where a metal drummer (Ahmed) loses his hearing. For his starring role, he was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars.

“I always think that when you’re brought to your knees, you’re halfway towards praying. 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 on 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,” he said. “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.”

Sound of Metal is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.