Jamie Dornan’s friend has claimed the actor was hospitalized due to heart attack symptoms caused by toxic caterpillars during a trip to Portugal last year — learned that’s not entirely true.
Gordon Smart was a guest on BBC’s The Good, the Bad and the Unexpectedpodcast, and spoke about his and the 41-year-old Fifty Shades of Grey star’s apparent health scare after a trip to a golf resort. Smart said he initially attributed their alleged issues to excessive drinking the night before. However, he claimed that both he and Dornan were astonished to learn that their symptoms were possibly the result of an encounter with processionary caterpillars, known for their toxicity.
On the podcast, Smart claimed that he and the actor were both hospitalized, but ET has learned that Dornan was never hospitalized and, in fact, played a round of golf the day after the incident — and won.
On the podcast, Smart described feeling a “tingling in his left hand and tickling in his left arm” on the first day of his and Dornan’s vacation, initially fearing it was the onset of a heart attack. After receiving medical attention, the Scottish broadcaster and former journalist said he returned to his hotel to discover Dornan hooked up to medical equipment. Smart claimed the actor was also experiencing numbness in his limbs and was taken away in an ambulance.
“Jamie said, ‘Dear me. Gordon, about 20 minutes after you left, my left arm went numb, my left leg went numb, my right leg went numb, and I found myself in the back of an ambulance,'” Smart said on the podcast. “Anyway, as he left the hospital, the paramedics asked them for a selfie, which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.”
The following week, Smart said a doctor informed him that the apparent symptoms might be linked to toxic caterpillars found on golf courses in southern Portugal, known to harm dogs and cause heart attacks in men in their 40s. The Pine processionary moth caterpillars possess tiny hairs containing an irritating protein, causing painful skin, eye, and throat irritations, according to Forest Research.
“It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” he said. “The good news is it wasn’t a caffeine overdose, it wasn’t a hangover — it was a poisonous, toxic caterpillar.”
