Jenifer Lewis is opening up about her recovery process after a recent brush with death.
In a new interview with Tamron Salon on her daytime talk show, the 67-year-old Black the actress said she considers herself lucky to be alive after falling 10 feet from a hotel balcony and falling into a dry ravine during a trip to Africa. Lewis first detailed the horrific incident in a revealing interview with Good Morning AmericaIt’s Robin Roberts in March.
ET obtained an exclusive clip of Lewis’ upcoming appearance on Tamronwhich shows the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air the actress chokes back tears as she tries to tell the 53-year-old talk show host the extent of her rehabilitation following the traumatic fall.
“Oh, guys, I couldn’t remember,” Lewis says before abruptly interrupting and asking for a moment to compose himself. “In Nairobi, when I was asked to walk, you know the parallel bars, I couldn’t remember how to walk… ‘How do you do that?'”
As she continued, the I love it for you star choked back sobs as she described the immense pain – both physical and emotional – of having to start from scratch. She explains that for the first few weeks after the fall, she couldn’t even remember how to put one foot in front of the other. In addition to the inherent struggle to push her body physically, Lewis shared that she was equally hard on herself mentally.
“I sat in the wheelchair and cried. And I heard myself say, ‘You’re going to get up, you’re going to get up and you’re going to walk or I’ll kill you myself,'” she said through tears. “’You get up and walk, come on, baby.’ And I walked.”
Lewis’ interview will air on Tamron on Friday, April 5th. Watch the exclusive clip in the player below:
Last month, Lewis spoke about the fall for the first time to Roberts, 63, telling her about the horrific experience of falling from the balcony in the dark and fearing no one would find or help her in time.
“Nothing was moving. So I stood there and said, ‘Move your body, baby. Come on, Jenny. Move your body,'” she told Roberts. “My last thought, because I’m Jenifer Lewis, was, ‘What a headline.’
Fortunately, despite finding it “difficult to take a deep breath to scream,” she was able to get help and was taken to hospital and treated for her serious injuries. Lewis told the outlet that although the last year of her life in recovery has been “the hardest year” she has ever faced, she is only getting stronger every day and wants to use her own story to inspire others.
“Whether it’s breaking up in a relationship, fighting with your parents, physically falling, any fall, I want to tell the world, ‘Oh yes, you can get up,’” she said.
ET I last spoke to Lewis at PaleyFest in 2022, when she closed the book on Black chapter of his life, which lasted almost a decade. On the hit ABC series, Lewis played Ruby Johnson, the mother of Anthony Anderson’s character Andre Johnson.
At the time, she said that of all the things she would miss about the Emmy-nominated series – which she also starred in Tracee Ellis Ross, Yara Shahidi, Marco Scribner, Brown Miles It is Marsai Martin – would be the members of her on-screen family, i.e. her character’s grandchildren, who she would miss most.
“I’m going to miss the kids. I was telling Marcus how I rocked them that first week I arrived and now they have mustaches and everything that goes with them,” she shared. “And they are beautiful, they are all beautiful. They’re talented, they’re good people – that’s what I’m proud of, they’re good kids.”
Black it ran from 2014 to 2022 and spawned two successful spinoffs, Adult It is Mixed.
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