11 Celebrities Who Have Spoken Out On Their Near-Death Experiences

Then 15 years old, the actor faced a life-threatening situation when his intestines twisted and doctors didn’t realize he was bleeding internally. Murray’s football-shaped physique actually prevented the medical team from making an accurate diagnosis. “This sounds so stupid — and trust me, I’m not on an ego trip when I say this — but because I was in physical good condition, my abdomen was tight and when I started bleeding internally, my stomach didn’t expand,” Murray said on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show. “Basically, my abs kept it flat so the doctors couldn’t tell I was bleeding.”

“I almost died,” he continued. “They had a priest at the end of my bed. I remember, it was the only time I ever saw my dad cry — well, one of two times.”

Murray credits a nurse with saving his life by going “against the grain” when she “locked the door” and gave him “four units of blood.” “[She] saved my life that night,” he said. “Her name was Sandy, I’ll never forget her, we took her chocolates for years after until she moved hospitals.”

Before he was famous, Hemsworth had a brush with death growing up in Australia. “When I was a kid, one time I got my leg rope wrapped around my whole body like a ball, under water,” he told Men’s Health. “Couldn’t get up. I was in waist-deep water, but I almost drowned. You know, I’ve had a few times.” Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale!

During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, The Greatest Showman actor revealed that things almost got deadly when he decided to work out with his costar, Hugh Jackman, one morning in London.

“I cycled with him in London, but I’m not one to ride a bike early in the morning in traffic so it turned out to be quite dangerous,” Efron told host Norton. “I followed Hugh around a few cars and suddenly there was a double decker bus right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, went under the front tire and narrowly missed death.”

Efron joked that Jackman wasn’t that concerned. “Hugh was on the other side of the road and stuck up his thumb and just said, ‘You good? Let’s go,’ ” Efron said.

Schumer and surfing don’t mix. The comedienne had a brush with death after she was involved in a surfing accident during a high school-era lesson. “I have a pretty bad scar on my leg from surfing,” she told Vanity Fair. “Forty-one stitches, three layers. I skegged myself. My whole fin went into my leg, and I had to yank it out. I was by myself.” It was winter, so when she arrived back on the beach (her leg gushing blood), she found only one man who was able to help her, holding her leg closed until the ambulance arrived. “I wish I knew who that guy was, because he saved my life, for sure.”

When it comes to things DiCaprio is thankful for, we’re guessing Edward Norton ranks pretty high on the list. Why? He saved his life during a scuba diving expedition in the Galapagos Islands when DiCaprio’s oxygen tank failed. Norton noticed and shared his tank with the Oscar winner while they swam back to the surface.

Morgan was famously involved in a car accident that took the life of his friend, James McNair. Morgan suffered a traumatic brain injury during the crash and was in the hospital for months, but has made a miraculous recovery. He told Oprah Winfrey that the crash changed his outlook on life. “Something’s different,” he said. “The way I am with people, something’s just different. I find myself saying ‘I love you’ 200 times a day to strangers. I don’t care – I don’t gotta know you to love you, I love you!”

Odom famously was on death’s door after he overdosed and was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel. Despite days spent in a coma, he slowly but surely regained his health (with estranged wife Khloé Kardashian by his side). His recovery has been nothing short of miraculous, which he showed just five months after his overdose, stepping out publicly for the first time at Kanye West’s fashion show/concert.

Paralympian Amy Purdy came close to death in 1999 after contracting meningitis and going into cardiac arrest. “I was on my death bed, and I remember hanging on to these words, ‘Don’t be scared. You are going to live an amazing life,’ and I have,” she said the experience. She truly has – she went on to compete in the Paralympics and Dancing With the Stars.

Schumer isn’t the only star who had a close call while surfing. On the set of Chasing Mavericks in Northern California, Butler was pulled underwater and dragged across a reef filled with rocks. Thankfully, he was rescued by a safety patrolman and quickly taken to a nearby hospital. The incident was as serious as it sounded, Butler said: “This was maybe one of the few times that the reports were not exaggerated. It was a pretty close call. … [The waves] just took me and I couldn’t get up. It was pretty hairy.”

The Blink-182 drummer came very, very close to death in 2008, during a plane crash that killed four other people. He suffered second and third-degree burns after the accident but recuperated enough to get back in the studio two months later. “I can’t wait to get out of here and be home with the babes,” he wrote in the weeks after the accident. “The doctors say I’m healing up quickly, and I’m going to be out of here before you know it.”

Back in 2007, the rapper nearly died after an overdose on prescription drugs. He explains, “I had overdosed in 2007, like, right around Christmas in 2007… I pretty much almost died. I pulled through and went home and relapsed less than a month later and I literally shot back up to the amount of pills I was taking, shot right back up to where I overdosed,” he told Access Hollywood. For him, it was a wake-up call. “The biggest problem is admitting that you have a problem,” he said. “Nobody wants to admit that they’re not in control of something.”