Megan Thee Stallion’s hands locked up, then her face followed. In the middle of her first week on Broadway, the rapper genuinely believed she was having a stroke.
The 31 year old opened up to America’s Marie Claire about the scare, which hit while she was starring as the emcee Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical.
She admitted she hadn’t been eating properly and was badly dehydrated during preparations, all while pushing herself not to “let anyone down.”
Getting tearful in the interview, Megan said she’d been showing up “a little bit mentally not okay” every single day. “I thought I was having a stroke,” she told the magazine.
“I wasn’t getting any oxygen to my brain, so my hands had froze. My face had froze,” she explained. I was trying to tell everybody that I don’t think I’m okay. They only thought I was dehydrated.”
Doctors eventually landed on a different answer. The hospital determined the WAP star was suffering from exhaustion and a panic attack.
Her castmate Kelsie Watts, who played Satine, saw the warning signs from a few feet away. Their first moment together comes after Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, out on the passerelle right beside the front row.
“I looked at her, and she had barely any colour in her face, was shaking, was sweating, and I was like, ‘This is not normal,'” Watts recalled. She added that this was especially true for someone who works as hard as Megan and always wants to push through.
“When I got offstage, I was like, ‘Something’s gonna happen. She’s not okay,'” Watts said. The show ended up pausing for around 20 minutes.
Even then, getting Megan to leave wasn’t easy. According to Watts, she wanted to keep going because she knew “so many hotties were there and so many people were excited to see her, but she had to [go].”
Watts also pointed to the schedule as a big part of the problem. She was burning the candle at both ends,” she said, explaining that outside rehearsals Megan was working on her album, doing press or heading to photo shoots.
“A lot of people don’t realise, eight shows a week is just different,” Watts continued. “Until you do it, you can’t describe it, but it’s really freaking hard, and I think she was just exhausted.”
For her part, the HISS rapper admits she underestimated the stage grind. She described theatre performers working every day except Mondays and said seeing them stay upbeat through the fatigue changed her attitude. “I stopped complaining,” she said.
Megan wrapped her Moulin Rouge! run on 1 May, two weeks ahead of the originally scheduled 17 May finale. Despite the hospital trip, she has nothing but love for the experience, calling it “one of the best experiences, as a performer, in my life.”
These days she says she’s making some changes. I’m definitely trying to stay more hydrated and be more calm,” she said, and fans will be watching to see how that new approach carries into her next chapter.
