Kodi Smit-McPhee has been left blind in one eye after he developed a cataract and was too busy to see a doctor.
The 28-year-old actor — who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 2021 Western The Power of the Dog — has revealed he developed a condition called ankylosing spondylitis — which causes inflammation and leads to pain, tiredness and stiffness — when he was 18 and had trouble with his left eye but was so busy making movies he put off seeing a doctor until it was too late to save his sight.
He told The Telegraph newspaper: “Ironically, I was playing a superhero in X-Men, and then I was doing these other action films like Alpha. And I went through very tough times on those jobs …
“I just didn’t follow up on it [the cataract]. You know, I was thinking too much and I couldn’t get back to the doctor. Eventually the cataract had done so much damage. It was in atrophy. So in that eye I can’t see anything.”
In the interview, Kodi admits he thinks “suppressed trauma” led to his health issues after becoming a successful child actor and then seeing his parents’ marriage collapse when he was a teenager.
He explained: “Looking after my family and projecting these ideas onto myself. They weren’t things that were expected of me, but while I saw it [acting] as the greatest experience of my life, I also saw it as, like, ‘Oh, this is something that I can do to save everyone’
“Everyone was splitting up and my sister moved out. My dad was home, and I thought: ‘Oh s***, I didn’t get to save everyone’. I only got to do it for myself, and it felt very selfish. It felt like impostor syndrome.”
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