Jay Leno jokes he is ‘two-faced’ after having surgery twice to fix damage from gas fire and motorcycle crash
Jay Leno joked that his “new face” is “better” than the old one – two years after he was burned in a gasoline fire and needed plastic surgery to repair the damage.
Weeks after the fire, he suffered a bone-breaking motorcycle accident that also required further surgery to reconstruct his facial features.
Now he has revealed that after the crash he told his doctor: ‘Listen, I need a different face. That other face you had was great, but I just need another one.”
He made the candid comments while presenting an award to Dr. Peter Grossman, the surgeon who worked on him after both incidents.
“So I guess I’m officially a two-faced b****** now,” the comedian cracked on stage 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 in a gasoline fire and needed plastic surgery to repair the damage; pictured on Monday
In November 2022, Jay Leno was working in his garage on one of his retro cars when a 1907 steam engine blew up in his face.
He suffered third-degree burns and had to spend ten days in hospital, where he was treated in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
Just two days after he was fired, Jay was proudly back in the saddle, driving around Los Angeles in another of his vintage cars.
However, disaster struck again in January 2023 when Jay was in a motorcycle accident that broke his collarbone and two ribs and tore both kneecaps.
Jay was wearing a clothesline when he ran into a wire that had been pulled across a parking lot without a flag, he told police. 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 fireplace was “seamless.”
He explained: ‘My recovery took nine days. I missed two days of work, so it wasn’t bad. Better than the face I had, so I’ll take it.’
On stage, he explained that he went straight to the Grossman Burn Center for treatment after getting “a face full of gasoline” and being set on fire.
“So I guess I’m 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 fireplace was ‘seamless’
He made the candid comments while presenting an award to Dr. at the Daytime Beauty Awards. Peter Grossman, the surgeon who worked on him after both accidents.
Jay is pictured in a still from his show Jay Leno’s Garage, which was officially canceled shortly after his motorcycle accident just weeks after the gas fire
Pictured is Jay being discharged from the Grossman Burn Center in November 2022, days after the gas fire and plastic surgery
He is pictured in May 2023, after undergoing the second plastic surgery on his face to repair the injuries he sustained in the motorcycle accident in January
However, he returned home that evening to care for his 44-year-old wife Mavis Leno, who was revealed this year to have Alzheimer’s disease.
“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 sit there with scissors and try to cut the cushion off. So Dr. Grossman took the pillow off my face,” Jay recalled.
About two months later he found himself again under the care of Dr. Grossman after the motorcycle accident that broke several bones.
“I was riding my motorcycle and there was a guy with a wire across the road, and boom, he ripped my face off. I called Dr. Grossman and said, ‘Listen, I need a different face. The different face you had was great, but I just need another one,” Jay said.
During the same event, Dr. Grossman confessed that the public attention to Jay’s case made him feel a degree of added tension.
“The biggest challenge in dealing with Jay Leno was that the whole world was watching as it happened. And that’s a little bit of extra pressure in a field that already has a lot of pressure on it,” he said.
“But probably the biggest part is getting to know the type of individual that Jay was. Jay is kind, generous and as down to earth as you could imagine, and just a genuinely good person, and to me he has become a role model.”