The 'Black-ish' actress divulged that she fell 10 feet from a balcony while in Africa.
Jenifer Lewis is opening up about her recovery process after a recent brush with death.
In a new interview with Tamron Hall on her daytime talk show, the 67-year-old Black-ish actress said that she considers herself lucky to be alive after falling 10 feet from the balcony of a hotel and into a dry ravine during a trip to Africa. Lewis first detailed the horrific incident in a tell-all interview with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts in March.
ET obtained an exclusive clip from Lewis' upcoming appearance on Tamron, which shows the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actress choking back tears as she attempts to tell the 53-year-old talk show host the extent of her rehabilitation following the traumatic fall.
"Oh guys, I couldn't remember," Lewis said before cutting off abruptly and asking for a moment to collect herself. "In Nairobi, when they asked me to walk, you know the parallel bars, I couldn't remember how to walk... 'How do you do that?'"
As she continued, the I Love That For You star held back sobs while describing the immense pain -- both physical and emotional -- of having to start from scratch. She explained that in those early weeks after the fall, she couldn't even remember how to put one foot in front of the other. On top of the inherent struggle to push her body physically, Lewis shared that she was just as tough on herself mentally.
"I sat down in the wheelchair, and I sobbed. And I heard myself say, 'You will get up, you will get up and you will walk or I'll kill you myself,'" she said through tears. "'You get up and you walk, come on, baby.' And I walked."
Lewis' interview airs on Tamron on Friday, April 5. Watch the exclusive clip in the player below:
Just last month, Lewis opened up for the first time about the fall to Roberts, 63, telling her about the horrifying experience of dropping from the balcony in the dark and worrying that no one would find her or help her in time.
"Nothing would move. So, I laid there, I said, 'Move your body, baby. Come on, Jenny. Move your body,'" she told Roberts. "My last thought, because I am Jenifer Lewis, was, 'What a headline.'"
Thankfully, despite finding it "hard to even take a big breath to scream," she was able to get help and was taken to the hospital and treated for her severe injuries. Lewis told the outlet that while the last year of her life in recovery has been "the hardest" year she has ever faced, she only gets stronger every day and wants to use her own story to inspire others.
"Whether it's falling out of a relationship, falling out with your parents, falling down physically, any fall, I wanna tell the world, 'Oh yes, you can get up," she said.
ET last spoke with Lewis at PaleyFest back in 2022 as she closed the book on the Black-ish chapter of her life, which took up nearly a decade. In the hit ABC series, Lewis played Ruby Johnson, the mother of Anthony Anderson's character, Andre Johnson.
At the time, she said that of all the things she would miss about the Emmy-nominated series -- which also starred Tracee Ellis Ross, Yara Shahidi, Marcus Scribner, Miles Brown and Marsai Martin -- it would be her on-screen family members, namely her character's grandchildren, that she would miss the most.
"I'm gonna miss the kids. I was just telling Marcus how I swung them around that first week I came in and now they've got mustaches and everything that goes with it," she shared. "And they are beautiful, all of them are beautiful. They're talented, they're good people -- that's what I'm proud of, they're good kids."
Black-ish ran from 2014 to 2022 and spawned two successful spinoffs, Grown-ish and Mixed-ish.
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