Tony Award-winning actor Billy Porter is finally opening up about the medical emergency that forced him to leave Broadway.
The Pose star appeared on an episode of Outlaws with TS Madison on March 4, where he explained how a terrifying bout of sepsis nearly ended his life and forced him to bow out of his role in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club in Sept. 2025.
“I checked myself into the hospital [Tuesday night] because I’m in so much pain, and I woke up on Saturday [night],” he remembered.
Porter went to the hospital for a "routine check" to remove a kidney stone trapped in his urethra, but it turned out that his medical condition was much more serious than he initially thought.
“When they got in there, there was so much puss and bile and infection behind the stone,” he said. “It bubbled up and I went uroseptic in minutes.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, urosepsis is a life-threatening “type of sepsis that begins in your urinary tract” and happens when a urinary tract infection “goes untreated and spreads to your kidneys.”
“I was on the ECMO machine, I was dead for 3 days,” Porter explained as he tried not to cry. An Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine is a type of life support that pumps blood outside of the body to a heart-lung machine that removes carbon dioxide and sends oxygen-rich blood back to the body.
At the time of his hospitalization, Porter was on Broadway playing the Emcee in Cabaret, but had to exit in the middle of the play’s run, which wasn’t supposed to end until Oct. 2025.
"Due to a serious case of sepsis, Billy Porter must also withdraw from the production. His doctors are confident that he will make a full recovery but have advised him to maintain a restful schedule,” the producers said in a statement at the time.
The 56-year-old actor added that while he was comatose, he developed compartment syndrome, where the muscles are deprived of oxygen, and the doctors had “to cut [him] open on either side of [his] leg” — from his knee to his hip — and “leave it open for two days so they could save [his] leg.”
"I was dead for three days. I am a miracle. I'm a walking miracle," he said.
Looking back on the life-threatening experience, Porter shared, “I am so grateful to be here. It is such a gift.”
Porter first announced his medical condition late last year, but hadn't opened up about the whole experience. "It was not easy. It’s been a very, very challenging four months," he said in a video posted to Instagram in Dec. 2025. "And I want everybody to know that I am on the road to a full recovery. I’m not there yet, but I’m on the road to that.”
