By Kayla DeKraker
Actor Chad Michael Murray knows that God can turn the worst of situations around and uses them for our good.
While on the “Great Company With Jamie Laing” podcast, Murray revealed that his career began while he was literally on his deathbed.
“I was hospitalized for two and a half months,” he shared. “It was a lot. We had surgery. I had internal bleeding, I lost 50% of my blood. I was on my deathbed.”
At the age of 15, he was hospitalized for serious complications after his intestines twisted, and the situation was so bad that his family believed he was going to die.
“I just remember seeing my father, the weakest I’d ever seen him, and a priest at the end of my bed, and they’re talking about last rites and all that stuff and gave me a blood transfusion to save my life. It saved my life.”
He added, “My organs shut down because you have blood all coagulated around them and they got to wait…So anyway, I had to have a second surgery to clean everything up.”
While he was recovering, Alana, one of the nurses who cared for Murray, told him she had connections in the entertainment industry.
“Alana says to me, ‘Oh gosh, you should model,’” Murray recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to model. I want to be an actor. Like, I love film and television. I want to give this gift to other people.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, you can segue from modeling into acting. Look, when you get out, I’m hooking you up with this modeling company I know.’ And she meant it.”
But Murray had to recover first. He lost so much weight from being so sick that he was unrecognizable.
“I got out. I went from, like, 180 to 118 pounds,” he said. “I was a skeleton when I got out, it was the scariest thing ever. I remember looking in the mirror the first time going, ‘Who is that?’ Like, I cried. I couldn’t believe that I was looking back at that guy.”
Even though it was such a hard time, it laid the foundation for the rest of his life — and his faith.
“I started my relationship with God,” Murray said, “and my relationship with my father became really close, because my dad raising five kids on his own came to the hospital every single day and he spent multiple, multiple, countless nights with me.”
That experience set him on course to become an actor, and his career includes projects like ONE TREE HILL and FREAKY FRIDAY. Most recently he starred in the sequel FREAKIER FRIDAY alongside Lindsey Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Related: Chad Michael Murray Chooses Roles With His Kids in Mind: ‘I’m a Family Guy’
Murray is also a husband and father to three children, whose names he keeps private. His oldest was son was born in 2015 and his youngest daughter arrived in 2023.
In an interview last month with Parade, the actor revealed how his kids reacted to watching FREAKY FRIDAY for the first time.
“We watched the first one right before I started filming, so I could say, ‘Hey guys, this is what Daddy’s going to do. This is a story that I’m going to go tell,’” he explained. “And I just remembered them laughing so hard at the movie and saying, ‘Daddy, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Why are you doing this?’”
Murray’s story is an example of how God can take a tragic situation and make something beautiful. Isaiah 61:3 says God gives a “crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
His testimony is a great example of God doing exactly that.
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