The serious injury George Clooney suffered while making ‘Syriana’ led him to consider his life
After George Clooney performed in the 2005 political thriller Syriana, directed by Stephen Gaghan, the iconic actor won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. However, during the production of the film, Clooney suffered a life-threatening injury that almost led him to the point of suicide.
While filming a scene in which Clooney’s character is tortured, the actor fell and injured his head. It was no ordinary bump, though, and spinal fluid began to leak from Clooney’s nose. When he returned to the United States from Morocco, Clooney immediately checked himself in at the hospital to get his injury checked out. The damage was worse than he could have ever imagined.
Clooney discussed the incident and its aftermath with The Hollywood Reporter. He said, “I knew immediately [how serious it was]. I thought I’d had a stroke. It was like a train horn going off in your head, and you can’t see, and you can’t stand.”
Of the procedure in the hospital, he added, “Then we started doing these things called myelograms, where they shoot contrast into your system, and you can see what’s leaking out. I had a two-and-a-half-inch tear in the middle of my back and a half-inch tear in my neck.”
The whole ordeal left Clooney in a dour mood, thinking he was seriously going to die. “Talk to any doctor about a CSF — a cerebral/spinal fluid leak — and they’ll tell you it’s way up there on the pain scale,” he said. “There was this whole coming to terms with [mortality].”
In another interview with Rolling Stone, Clooney further reiterated the mental state he was in. “I was at a point where I thought, I can’t exist like this. I can’t actually live.’ I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and for a short three-week period,” he said.
“I started to think, ‘I may have to do something drastic about this.’ You start to think in terms of, you don’t want to leave a mess, so go in the garage, go in the car, start the engine,” Clooney sadly added. “It seems like the nicest way to do it, but I never thought I’d get there. See, I was in a place where I was trying to figure out how to survive.”
Harrison Ford actually turned down the role in Syriana and once claimed that it was one of the biggest regrets of his career. Still, with the amount of pain that Clooney went to and the fact that it nearly drove him to the point of suicide, perhaps Ford ought to thank his lucky stars that fate had him reject the role.
