“I was still on morphine,” Lewis said of her stint on The Masked Singer, after she “escaped death” following a near-fatal fall in 2022 that really changed her outlook on life.
For Jenifer Lewis, life lately has been all about resilience.
After falling 10 feet during a trip to Nairobi in November 2022, and fracturing her acetabulum, the socket of the hip bone that holds the femur in place, Lewis underwent nine hours of surgery, and eight months of intensive rehab and physical therapy — but she was only five months into her recovery when she decided to step onto The Masked Singer stage.
TooFab spoke to Lewis ahead of her unmasking Wednesday, where the longtime singer-actress shared how participating in the singing competition series helped her regain her confidence after nearly losing her life in the Serengeti.
“I was only five months into the fall, so I was still on morphine,” Lewis, who performed as Miss Cleocatra revealed. “I’ve been telling everybody, if you look carefully when I’m sitting on the throne, you’ll see that Cleocatra head kind of go [mimics nodding off].
She continued, “It’s nodding off a little bit. But I was all right girl, look, I was in pain, but my friend said, ‘Get up. Get up and go do what you love to do.'”
While Lewis said she was still on a walker and couldn’t walk, she was able to sing and move about pretty well in that Cleocatra costume thanks to the help of TMS crew.
“Masked Singer was great. They knew I couldn’t walk, so they had the boys escort me. The ‘Stormy Weather,’ I was bolted down in a harness. They bolted me down ’cause I couldn’t walk. And they said they’d take care of me, and they did,” the Black-ish star explained. “The second song, you’ll notice that I never let go of the mic stand, even if I was kicking a little bit. I didn’t let go ’cause I would’ve fallen, and they bolted that down. So, they took good care of me.”
“I was still on a walker, couldn’t walk, but I could sing. And my soul was in the fun. And that’s why my friends wanted me to get out of bed,” she added. “They said, ‘Come on, come on, you can do this. They said they’d take care of you.'”
Looking back on her accident, Lewis remarked on the full circle moment of have Doctors Without Borders by her side following the fall, after making a donation to the organization during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When Doctors Without Borders showed up, and I don’t mention this a lot because I stay anonymous in my donations, but at the height of Covid, I had sent Doctors Without Borders, a huge donation, ’cause I knew they needed it so badly. So when that woman, when she leaned down and said, ‘Ms. Lewis, we are Doctors Without Borders, and we’re gonna put you in a helicopter and we’re gonna take care of you,” the 67-year-old film and TV star recounted, getting choked up as she looked back on that harrowing moment.
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“Talk about the circle of life,” she added. “So it is a triumphant testimony because I’m back baby.”
Lewis showed just how back she is with her performance on TMS, and it’s inspired the beloved actress, who got her start on Broadway, to consider a return to the stage.
“We’ll see. We’ll see. I can always go back to Broadway. You know, Broadway is hard. Doing Broadway is like being in the Olympics. You’re eight shows a week. You are on, you gotta sleep. And when you get up, you gotta warm up. You gotta get ready. It’s a lot of work, Broadway,” Lewis shared before teasing her one-woman show, which she says will detail what happened to her on that fateful night in the African jungle. “I think I’ll be doing my one woman show titled, ‘Jennifer Lewis Unleashed,’ where I’m gonna talk about Africa. It’s gonna be comedy. I’m gonna talk about how when I was laying on the ground and pitch black, I came outta my body and the baboon wanted a selfie. It’s gonna be so stupid. And you know, the, the hippo comes over and I say, have you heard of Ozempic, bitch? Get the f–k out. You’re not eating it.”
“It’s all that stupid,” she quipped, before sharing that she’s found humor in what happened to her. “I mean, now I can laugh about the fall, as terrifying as the whole experience was. I mean, you can’t make that up. You can’t make up wild animals. Who falls in a pit and there’s wild animals? Lions roaring and s–t girl. I was like, ‘What!?'”
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Lewis, who was forced to keep her Masked Singer performance shrouded in secrecy, did the same when it came to the accident, revealing that she didn’t even tell her family she was in the hospital until after she was recovering.
“I had to tell when I was ready,” Lewis, who first opened up about the 2022 incident in March, said.
“I kept it so under the radar, very few people knew. My dear friends knew. I didn’t tell my family until I got [home], you think I was gonna tell my siblings, their baby sister was in Nairobi, in ICU?” she added, again choking back tears. “What the f–k were they gonna do? Like I told Robin Roberts, fly down there and bring me flowers?”
“I needed all of Jennifer. That s–t was so painful. I knew I would need every inch of who I was before I fell, to heal myself, to focus in, to work every day and work hard,” Lewis continued. “So by the time I did Masked Singer, I wasn’t even halfway back. I would say I was a little over a fourth back. But it did help me. My friends know me. They were like, ‘Get her. Make her.’ And I’m glad I did. It was fun.”
Now, over year after the accident, back on her feet and dancing again, Lewis has shifted her focus to not only taking on the projects that make her feel good, but continuing to change that game and earning every day of her life.
“After falling like that baby, all you wanna do is serve, no drama, no stress, nothing. Let’s have fun. Let’s be happy. Let’s get the job done. No more time — time becomes so precious when you escape death like that. And trust me, I escaped death. That boulder was six inches from my head,” Lewis shared.
She continued, “… So when you escape that, what I feel like is that I’m the only one that survived a plane crash. And when that happens, you owe to earn being alive, you gotta be a game changer. You gotta focus in on helping people and giving back. And more than that, share the story. ‘How did you come back, Ms. Lewis? How?’ The first, was you gotta want to come back.”
The Masked Singer and Group B continues with “Soundtrack to My Life Night” next Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
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