Jay Leno joked that his ‘new face’ is ‘better’ than the old one – two years after he was burned up in a gasoline fire and needed plastic surgery to repair the damage.
Weeks after the blaze, he suffered a bone-breaking motorcycle accident that also forced him to have another operation to reconstruct his features.
Now he has revealed that after the crash, he told his doctor: ‘Listen, I need another face. The other face you got was great, but I just need another.’
He made the candid remarks while presenting an award to Dr. Peter Grossman, the surgeon who worked on him after both incidents.
‘So I guess I am officially a two-faced b****** now,’ the comedian cracked onstage at the 2024 Daytime Beauty Awards this week, via E! News.
Jay Leno joked that his ‘new face’ is ‘better’ than the old one – two years after he was burned up in a gasoline fire and needed plastic surgery to repair the damage; pictured Monday
In November 2022, Jay Leno was working on one of his retro cars in his garage when a 1907 steam engine exploded in his face.
He was covered in third-degree burns and had to spend 10 days in the hospital, during which he was treated in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
Just two days after he was discharged, Jay was proudly back in the saddle, cruising around Los Angeles in another one of his vintage automobiles.
However disaster struck again in January 2023 when Jay was in a motorcycle accident that broke his collarbone and two ribs, as well as cracking both kneecaps.
Jay was ‘clotheslined’ when he drove into a wire that had been pulled across a parking lot without an attached flag, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
On the red carpet at the Daytime Beauty Awards, he said the process of getting a ‘brand new face’ after the gas fire was ‘seamless.’
He explained: ‘My recovery was nine days. I missed two days of work, so it was not bad. Better than the face I had, so I’ll take it.’
Onstage, he explained that he headed straight to the Grossman Burn Center for treatment after getting ‘a face full of gasoline’ and being set ablaze.
‘So I guess I am officially a two-faced b****** now,’ the comedian cracked onstage at the 2024 Daytime Beauty Awards this week, via E! News; pictured during the red carpet portion
On the red carpet at the Daytime Beauty Awards, he said the process of getting a ‘brand new face’ after the gas fire was ‘seamless’
He made the candid remarks while presenting an award to Dr. Peter Grossman, the surgeon who worked on him after both accidents, at the Daytime Beauty Awards
Jay is pictured in a still from his show Jay Leno’s Garage, which was officially canceled shortly after he suffered a motorcycle accident just weeks following the gas fire
Jay is pictured being discharged from the Grossman Burn Center in November 2022, days after the gas fire and the plastic surgery
He is pictured in May 2023, after he had the second plastic surgery on his face to repair the injuries he suffered during the motorcycle crash that January
However he returned home that evening to tend to his wife of 44 years Mavis Leno, who it emerged this year has been suffering from Alzheimer’s.
‘I drive home, I see my wife and I go to sleep, not realizing this is still burning. When I wake up, I can’t get the pillow off my face. So, I’m sitting there with scissors trying to cut the pillow off. So, Dr. Grossman took the pillow off my face,’ Jay recalled.
About two months later, he found himself in Dr. Grossman’s care yet again after the motorcycle accident that broke multiple bones.
‘I’m riding my motorcycle and a guy had a wire across the road, and boom, it tore my face. I called Dr. Grossman and I said: “Listen, I need another face. The other face you got was great, but I just need another,”‘ said Jay.
At the same event, Dr. Grossman confessed that the public scrutiny on Jay’s case made him feel a certain degree of extra tension.
‘The biggest challenge with dealing with Jay Leno was that the entire world was watching as it was happening. And that’s a little bit of added pressure in a field that already has a lot of pressure to it,’ he said.
‘But probably the greatest part is learning the type of individual that Jay was. Jay is kind, he’s generous and he is as down to earth as you can imagine, and just a genuinely good person and has become, for me, a role model.’
