She told Harper’s Bazaar that: “I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired! I decided: ‘This is not something that’s going to define me.’ I never gave into any feeling of ‘Why me? This sucks’. I was just like – ‘gotta get back on it.”
After her second haemorrhage, she feared those she worked with would find her “unreliable” because “half my brain is gone”.
She said: “If I’m being brutally honest, the whole thing made me feel very ashamed. Like I was broken. As though the producers must think I’m an unreliable person that they’ve hired.
“If you look at my brain scans, there are a lot of black parts, and that is where it’s dead. How could I trust my experience? How could I trust that what was happening to me was real? Half my brain is gone. So what is gone with it? […] That plagued me for a really long time. It’s taken me a decade to understand that where I am now, and my identity, is a result of my experiences.”
The ‘Me Before You’ star admits she could have turned into a “right old d*******” if she hadn’t had a brain haemorrhage and going through major health scares has taught her how to “thrive on failure”.
She explained: “If I hadn’t had a brain haemorrhage, I might have turned into a right old d******, thinking I was the bee’s knees, living in Hollywood. I’m so much more aware of what’s happening, in the moment that it’s happening. I don’t worry about failure – I thrive on failure! If something goes wrong, I always think you can fix it. It hurts, it’s scary, but then you can do anything.”