The actor suffered from an infection that left him dead for minutes before doctors revived him.
Dean Winters, the man who played “Mayhem” for Allstate Insurance, revealed that he was dead for 5 minutes in 2009. The actor played the insurer’s chaotic walking whirlwind and has had personal experience with real-life disaster.
The actor recently revealed in an interview that an infection killed him for almost five minutes.
“I had a rough ride in an ambulance. I went septic due to an illness that I had as a kid and it caught up with me,” explained Dean Winters at ‘The White Crow’ premier. “I was dead in the back of an ambulance, and the great doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital [in Manhattan] brought me back to life after around four-and-a-half minutes.”
According to the actor, at first, he didn’t have any idea what had happened. “They don’t tell you what happened until a couple of months later,” he said in his interview with Us Weekly, as reported by the Huffington Post. “They don’t want to send you back into a mental trauma. It woke me up to a lot of things that were fuzzy.”
Dean Winters pointed out that as a result of the infection “I died on Fifth Avenue”.
Winters is best known for his appearances on ‘Oz’, ‘30 Rock’, and ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” as well as being Mayhem for Allstate Insurance.
Back in 2010, Winters spoke with Page Six, from the New York Post. In that interview, he explained that he had ignored a high fever on the day prior to the incident in which he found himself dead for a handful of minutes. At that time, he went to sleep and woke up again looking “the color gray.” He brought himself to his doctor’s office, where he promptly collapse.
The doctor called an ambulance, and it was in the vehicle while traveling along Fifth Avenue that he died and was revived.
In that same interview, Dean Winters added that his battle with the infection didn’t end with that temporary death. He was affected by gangrene and ended up having to suffer the amputation of half a thumb as well as two of his toes. That said, he also underscored that it would take “more than a finger and a couple of toes to keep me down.” He felt that this only further showed how appropriate he was for the role of Allstate’s Mayhem, who encourages homeowners and auto owners to be “better protected from Mayhem, like me,” as he triggered incidents on TV screens.