Simon Cowell sat down for his first one-on-one chat since his scary electric bike accident last fall with his ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour on Extra. Earlier on Wednesday (Feb 24) NBC announced that he and the entire crew would return for America’s Got Talent season 16 this summer.
Simon had been laying pretty low while he recovered from the accident, which broke his back. However, pap shots of him and his family on vacation in the Caribbean over the Christmas holiday showed Simon seemingly back to his old self.
Simon says he “nearly…smashed my spine to pieces”
About the bike accident he revealed, “It could have been a lot worse. When I saw the X-ray, I really nearly could have smashed my spine to pieces, so I literally wouldn’t have been able to walk.” He recalled “I knew I’d broken my back the minute I landed,” saying, “it was really, really kind of sudden and it hurt.”
He knew he wasn’t supposed to move, but he got himself inside to his bedroom anyway. “I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get back into the house because I can’t lie there’… and made myself kind of get carried into my bedroom, which is right there at the beginning of the house, and I’m lying there and I’m kind of passing out… It was surreal.”
Simon’s son after he came home from the hospital: “Daddy, you’re like Ironman.”
According to Simon he could not have recovered without his longtime partner Lauren Silverman and young son, Eric. “The hardest thing was, and I said this to Lauren when I came out of the hospital… I was so embarrassed about coming home looking about 100 because I couldn’t walk, and I have these metal rods in my back and these screws… I said, ‘Lauren, I just don’t know how to explain it to [Eric].’ She obviously said something to him because he came in… and I was lying in bed and he said, ‘Daddy, you’re like Ironman,’ and I thought that was the sweetest thing and it meant a lot.”
The hardest part of recovery? The “helplessness.”
For Simon, who struggled at times during his recovery, “the helplessness,” was most difficult. “I’ve never been in this situation in my life where you literally can’t move. The pain was off the charts… But you’ve got to stay positive… I made a promise to myself I’d be fitter than I was before I had the accident. Sure enough, that’s what happened.”
Simon’s accident happened right before the start of the AGT live shows. His serious injury meant he couldn’t finish the season. But the gang carried on without him. “They were almost too good. I was watching the show thinking, ‘Can you not be great?’ and they were great.”
Simon added, “What I did realize, there were no red buzzers throughout the live shows… None of them would use them.”
He plans to change all that when America’s Got Talent returns to NBC in May.
Watch Simon Cowell talk about his horrific bike accident on extra.
