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Cape Town - Turns out Australian actress Rebel Wilson has malaria to thank for her career!
The Pitch Perfect star revealed an episode of the podcast Aussies in Hollywood that she contracted a bad strain of the debilitating illness during a charity trip to Mozambique as a 19-year-old.
While being treated in hospital, the Australian hallucinated and had an epiphany that would change her life.
“I’m just lying there in hospital, can’t really hear, can’t really watch TV and I was just hallucinating on the drugs that I was an actress,” she said. She went on to explain she’d decided not to take malaria prophylactics as she’d heard “they can cause mental problems, so I ended up being the stupid person who got it (malaria)”.
“I was giving an acceptance speech (during the hallucination) and I gave an acceptance rap, which seems so dorky now. When people have kind of near-death experiences, people can experience certain things that really change the course of their life.”
The 39-year-old has certainly done well for herself. She’s one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actresses and her latest film, Isn’t It Romantic co-starring Liam Hemsworth, was released to Netflix this month.
She’ll also be heading back Down Under soon to shoot a new TV series called Les Norton.
The series, based on the books by Australian writer Robert G Barrett, is about a guy called Les who works in an illegal casino in the 1980s. The TV adaptation, which is said to feature lots of sex and violence, will also star Top of the Lake star David Wenham and Home and Away actor Alexander Bertrand.
Sources: Daily Mail, Just Jared
