Chad Michael Murray recalls being on 'deathbed' before acting career began

Chad Michael Murray had a life-threatening experience in his teenage.

"I was 15, and my intestines had twisted," Murray, 43, revealed on the Great Company podcast. "I was hospitalized for two and a half months. It was a lot."

"We had surgery. I had internal bleeding, [and] I lost 50 percent of my blood. I was on my deathbed," he recalled. 

The actor shared that he doesn’t even remember the hospital stay well as he was "in and out of consciousness."

The Freakier Friday actor was so ill that his dad, who was a single dad to five kids, thought he’d lose him.

"I just remember seeing my father, the weakest I’d ever seen him, and a priest at the end of my bed,” the One Tree Hill alum recalled. "They’re talking about last rites and all that stuff, and [the nurse] gave me a blood transfusion to save my life. It saved my life."

"Regardless, you’re in there for two months and, you know, my organs shut down because you have blood all coagulated around them, and they had to wait till everything. So, anyway, I had to have a second surgery to clean everything up," he detailed.

One silver lining to his hospital stay was the start of his modeling and acting career after his nurse referred him to a modeling agency.

"Alana says to me, ‘Oh gosh, you should model,'" he said. "I was like, 'I don’t want to model. I want to be an actor. Like, I love film and television. I want to give this gift to other people.’ She’s like, ‘Well, you can segue from modeling into acting. Look, when you get out, I’m hooking you up with a modeling company I know.’ And she meant it."

The nurse referred him, and the rest is history. Chad Michael Murray went on to become a heartthrob in the early 2000s through memorable roles in One Tree Hill, A Cinderella Story, Gilmore Girls and Freaky Friday.