Jay Leno has injured himself—again—and this time, he’s got an eyepatch to prove it.
After lighting his face on fire and breaking several bones in multiple car accidents, Leno is now sporting more injuries. In an interview outside of a comedy club, the 74-year-old former late-night host explained how one side of his face ended up covered in deep purple bruises, necessitating the eye covering.
“I was at a hotel that was on a hill and I said to the guy, ‘Where’s a good place to eat?’ [and he replied] ‘Oh, at the bottom of [the hill],’” Leno said, describing the incident in a video posted by TMZ. “The restaurant was there, but to get to it, I didn’t have a car, so you had to go walk about a mile and a half around.” Leno thought going around seemed unnecessary, as the hill “didn’t look that steep.” That’s when it all went wrong, he explained.
“About 60, 70 feet. And I thought ‘Lemme see if I can go down there,’” he recalled thinking before slipping and falling down the hill. “Boom. Yeah, I rolled down the hill. Hit my head on a rock, knocked me in the eye, there you go,” he said, lifting his eye patch to reveal a painful looking black eye that could barely open.
Instead of seeking medical attention after the fall though, Leno said he went and “did the show” and didn’t go to the hospital until he returned to Los Angeles. “It was only a couple hours before the show,” he explained. “There were 2600 people,” he said, so the show must go on. As painful as his bruises look, Leno insisted, “It’s not that big a deal” and he’s “holding up fine.”
One of Leno’s many vintage cars exploded in 2022, leaving him with third-degree burns and in need of skin grafts. Not long after that, in 2023, he hit a wire while riding his classic motorcycle, leaving him with a broken collarbone and ribs and cracked kneecaps.
