Jay Leno, iconic TV host and comedian, had a startling fall recently that left him with some fairly shocking injuries.
The 74-year-old is no stranger to misfortune in recent years, having sustained grevous burns back in November 2022 when flames erupted while he was working on one of the vintage cars in his collection. In 2023 he was also involved in a motorcycle crash which left him with a series of broken bones.
This time around his wounds weren’t so significant – nor was his accident so serious – but the popular TV star was left with visible injuries including a rather painful-looking bruise on his face.
Leno arrived at the Comedy For Kobe event in Beverly Hills on Monday, November 18, wearing an eyepatch over his left eye. The entire left side of his face was mottled blue and black with bruising, while he also had a bandage covering his wrist.
Where did Jay Leno fall from?
The star told TMZ that he had been staying at a hill-top hotel over the weekend and decided to eat at a restaurant that lay at the bottom of said hill. Rather than taking the designated mile-and-a-half long path, the comedian opted to walk directly down the hill, explaining that it was “60 to 70 feet” high and “didn’t look that steep”.
“I fell down and rolled down the hill,” Leno shared with TMZ. “Hit my head on a rock, knocked me on the eye,” he added, before lifting his eyepatch to reveal that his eye remained swollen shut.
“When I came back to LA, I went to the hospital,” he said. “It was only a couple of hours of the show, so. It’s not that big of a deal, it’s fine!”
According to reports, Leno refused to let his latest accident slow his step, appearing on stage for a scheduled comedy show just three hours after his fall.
Jay Leno’s injuries
As previously mentioned, the weekend’s traumatic incident adds to the list of bad luck Leno has experienced in recent years. Last year he made headlines after being clotheslined off his motorcycle. On that occasion he was left with broken bones.
“I still got a broken collarbone, two broken ribs, and a couple of cracked knee caps, so if you see me limping around here, well, you probably will for the next couple of videos,” Leno revealed in a video at the time.
“But like an idiot I am going to fix [the Indian motorcycle] and get back on it again, because as you know, once a man hits 40 you can’t really teach them anything. They just keep doing the same stuff over, and over, and over again. Luckily, I’m only 72, had I been an older man this could have been a serious accident.”
He added: “You can still see a little bit of a scar here [on my chin] and a scar on my neck [where the wire caught]; if I had been going like 50 or something, I probably would have been decapitated, so I was pretty lucky. And anytime you don’t get decapitated, well, that’s good luck.”
Back in 2022, meanwhile, the celebrated former host of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno went viral after pictures of him emerged showing nasty burns he had sustained in the process of working on one of his cars.
“I got some serious burns from a gasoline fire. I am OK. Just need a week or two to get back on my feet,” he told Page Six at the time.