Jamie Dornan was hospitalized with “heart attack symptoms” during a vacation in Portugal, according to his friend Gordon Smart.
The “Belfast” actor, 41, was on a boozy boys’ trip with “Good Morning Britain” presenter Smart and their other friends last year when they both fell mysteriously ill.
Recalling the incident on BBC’s “The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected” podcast, Smart revealed that they first thought they’d had too many drinks the night before – but, the culprit turned out to be processionary caterpillars, which are toxic.
Smart said, “We had a great time the first day, played loads of golf, went out, lots of wine was drunk and then we got on to espresso martinis.”
But the next day, they were all, “Absolutely dreadful.”
He described his symptoms as, “Tingling in my left hand and then tickling in my left arm. I’m the son of a GP and thought, ‘This is normally the sign of the start of a heart attack. Now, I’m a fairly healthy guy but once you start thinking, you’re having a heart attack, you’re pretty sure that you’re convincing yourself that you are having one.”
He went to the hospital, he said, where his resting heart rate was found to be extremely high.
When the doctor asked him to list what he had been drinking the previous day, he said, “As a Scottish man in Portugal, when you start saying, ‘Well, I think there were nine bottles of white wine, I had six espresso martinis,’ and I could see him shaking his head disgusted with the Scottish specimen in front of him.”
When Smart was discharged from the hospital and returned to his hotel, he saw the “Fifty Shades of Grey” actor hooked up to medical equipment, too, having gone through his own scare.
“Jamie said, ‘Dear me. Gordon, about 20 minutes after you left, my left arm went numb, my left leg went numb, my right leg went numb, and I found myself in the back of an ambulance,’” Smart revealed.
He also shared that as Dornan left the hospital, “The paramedics asked for a selfie, which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.”
Dornan has previously spoken out about his discomfort with the spotlight.
“I was very reluctant,” the Irish actor told British GQ in 2021 about starring in “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“I still remain reluctant. I didn’t say no. I auditioned for it and then went down the path of that and then someone else got it. I was like, ‘F–k, that’s great, what a nightmare for that guy [Hunnam]. He’s going to have all this scrutiny.”
A week later, the friends found out the cause of their shocking near-heart attack incident.
“It turns out that there are caterpillars on golf courses in the south of Portugal that have been killing people’s dogs and giving men in their 40s heart attacks,” Smart said.
The small hairs of the caterpillars have an irritating protein called thaumetopoein, which can cause skin, eye and throat irritations, rashes, and allergic reactions.
He concluded that they were “very lucky to come out of that one alive.”
The Post reached out to Dornan for comment.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
