15 Stars Who Had Near-Death Experiences: From Tracy Morgan to Donald Sutherland and More

On the set of Santa Clarita Diet, Drew Barrymore “almost died.” In one scene in her role as a zombie real estate agent the actress went to jump on a man’s back to kill him, but fell off, smashing her skull on the concrete. She was rushed to a hospital.

“It was f------ terrifying,” recalled the actress. “It was very serious. I’ve never had a feeling like that in my life.”

She was hospitalized for two days, getting MRIs and CAT scans. She was left with a bad concussion. Show creator Victor Fresco revealed, “I thought, ‘That’s it. We’ve killed Drew Barrymore.’”

Production was forced to shut down as the beauty recovered.

“Coming back, it was scary,” Barrymore recalled. "Everyone was really tense. But I love that this group of people, who aren’t family necessarily, are coming together and care about my well-being. It was a nice moment where you see the good in people."

The Pirates of the Caribbean star had a 1998 fall that crushed his spine. He was climbing up to a roof terrace when the drainpipe he was holding onto collapsed and he fell three flights to the ground “narrowly escaping death and paralysis.”

“Until then, I didn’t have a healthy appreciation for life and death — that we’re not invincible,” said Orlando Bloom. “And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I’m either going to walk again or not.”

Now, he’s “grateful every day for my limbs that allow me to push my limits and live life on my edge, but safer now."

The comic actor was nearly electrocuted while filming 1981’s Modern Problems, as he had a near-death experience and “woke up with a paramedic trying to get an IV hooked up. I remember opening my eyes and I was laid out on a blanket.”

The freak accident left him with a bad fear of getting near anything electric, Chevy Chase admitted. “For at least a year, I wouldn’t turn a light on or off” and asked others to do it," he said.

While on the set of her 1988 TV film Onassis: The Richest Man in the World, Jane Seymour came down with bronchitis and was administered an antibiotic, but it was mistakenly injected into a vein and not her muscle, which caused her to go into anaphylactic shock.

“I died and was resuscitated,” recalled the actress. “And I had the vision of seeing a white light and looking down and seeing myself in this bedroom with a nurse frantically trying to save my life and jabbing injections in me, and I’m calmly watching this whole thing ... After that, I realized your life is incredibly worth living and I don’t want to waste a moment of it."

Tracy Morgan was in a highway accident in 2014, which killed his friend James McNair and caused Morgan traumatic brain injury and left him in a coma. After he woke up and began the tough road back with rehab, he said his outlook on life changed.

“You’re never going to be normal after you go through something like that,” said Morgan. “You don’t die for a few weeks and then come back to normal, trust me. Something’s going to be missing, something’s going to be gained — you just got to live your life after that. 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!”

The Buddy Holly Story Oscar nominee was Hollywood’s bad boy until his devastating near-fatal 1988 motorcycle accident in which he was hurled headfirst into a curb.

“When I went to the Other Side, there were balls of light in the air and a voice said, ‘You may come with us now or return to your body and continue your destiny. It’s your choice,’” recalled Gary Busey.

Long before gaining a new set of movie fans as the evil president in The Hunger Games films, Donald Sutherland was filming Kelly Heroes with Clint Eastwood and Don Rickles when he contracted meningitis and his body shut down.

“Standing behind my right shoulder, I’d watched my comatose body slide peacefully down a blue tunnel. That same blue tunnel the near-dead always talk about. Such a tempting journey. So serene ... but suddenly I found myself back in my body," he said.

The Star Wars legend has had several brushes with death while flying his private plane. The worst was in 2015 when the vintage World War II plane he was flying had engine problems and he had to crash-land on a golf course.

When asked about the injuries, Harrison Ford joked, “A dislocated right ankle, a shattered pelvis, a broken back and a serious bump on the head with major lacerations. Other than that, nothing."

Later, he said he didn’t remember anything after the crash and the five days that followed because doctors had to place him in a medically induced coma so he could “survive.”

The actor says he “almost gave his life” while filming The Mummy in 1999.

Brendan Fraser passed out after he accidentally hanged himself for real when he was filming a scene in which his character, adventurer Rick O’Connell, was being hanged.

“I thought, ‘I’m gonna make this look really good,’ so I sort of took a few deep breaths and kind of bore down. Then I realized I was on the balls of my feet and the rope was going up and I had nowhere to go. Then the world kind of dialed down.”

He said he finally woke up when the stunt coordinator noticed what had happened.

“He’s clapping in my face, going, ‘Brendan! Brendan! Wake up! Wake up!’ And I did, and he goes, ‘Hey. Congratulations. You just joined the club with Mel Gibson.’ He got choked out on Braveheart, too.”

In 2018, the actor was in Sardinia, Italy, filming the Hulu series Catch-22 when he collided with a Mercedes while riding his motorcycle at 75 miles per hour, sending him flying over the handlebars and onto the pavement.

“It split my helmet in half, it knocked me out of my shoes,” said George Clooney. “I was hit hard. I was just waiting for the switch to turn off because I broke his windshield with my head, and I thought, ‘Okay, well, that’s my neck.’”

Clooney was rushed to the hospital, where he was treated and later released. But, he added, “If you get nine lives, I got all of them used up at once.”

Renowned for his drug use, the heavy metal rocker and reality star “died twice” following an ATV crash in 2003, and spent eight days in a coma.

“I would drift in and out of consciousness,” Ozzy Osbourne revealed. “Other times there would be a white light shining through the darkness, but no angels, no one blowing trumpets and no man in a white beard."

The Titanic star is a self-admitted “adrenaline junkie” who has lived a life of adventure, skydiving and scuba diving, and has had more than a few brushes with death.

“If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few,” he said.

While scuba diving in South Africa, “A great white [shark] jumped into my cage,” said Leonardo DiCaprio. “Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me. I sort of fell down to the bottom and tried to lie flat. The great white took about five or six snaps an arm’s length away from my head. The guys there said that has never happened in the 30 years they’d been doing it.”

During another scuba diving experience, DiCaprio got into a major accident — but Edward Norton saved his life. They were shooting a scene in the Galapagos Islands when DiCaprio's oxygen tank went out. He said Norton handled the crisis fast, sharing his tank and swimming them both to the surface.

In 2011, after filming the first season of Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke was in the gym working out when she suddenly collapsed. She was rushed to a hospital and told she had suffered a brain aneurysm. Then she had another aneurysm and surgery in 2013. She thought she’d never recover.

“I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail,” said the actress. “My mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn’t going to live.”

She was hospitalized for a month with a near-fatal health scare, which led her to start a charity called SameYou, which works to assist those in recovery from brain injuries.

In 2001, Sharon Stone had a brain hemorrhage that nearly ended her life and caused her to see people who had died.

“I started to see and be met by some of my friends ... people who were very, very dear to me [who had died],” she said. “I had a real journey with this that took me to places both here and beyond.”

The star said she isn’t scared of death after the experience.

“I get not to be afraid of dying and I get to tell other people that it’s a fabulous thing and death is a gift."