Brian Austin Green is opening up about a frightening health crisis that left him struggling with basic abilities, including walking, talking, reading and writing, and took more than four years to overcome.
The Beverly Hills, 90210 star, 53, revisited the mysterious neurological condition during an appearance on psychotherapist Kara Mayer Robinson’s Really Famous podcast. Despite the severity of his symptoms, Green said doctors never gave him a definitive explanation for exactly what happened.
“I ended up with this neurological thing, and it was, like, stroke-like symptoms,” Green said.
The actor recalled being approximately 39 or 40 when the problems emerged, placing the beginning of his health ordeal around 2012 or 2013. According to Green, the condition “was never completely diagnosed.”
Doctors apparently suspected several factors may have contributed.
“I had internal inflammation, so from diet,” he explained, “and then, they think, just emotional stress, not handling things well.”
What followed was a lengthy recovery that forced Green to relearn skills he had previously taken for granted.
“It took about four and a half years to recover from,” he revealed. “I had to learn how to walk again, to talk again. I had to learn how to sort of do everything again.”
The neurological symptoms also affected Green’s ability to process written language.
“I couldn’t read,” he said. “I couldn’t write. I couldn’t — who I was, essentially, was no more. My brain and my body completely disconnected.”
The ordeal occurred while Green was married to actress Megan Fox. The former couple married in 2010 and remained together, with periods of separation, until ending their relationship for good in 2020.
Green has discussed the unexplained illness before, including during a 2023 appearance on Cheryl Burke’s Sex, Likes and Spray Tans podcast.
At the time, he said his doctors believed dietary factors were behind his health problems. He was also diagnosed with vertigo and ulcerative colitis, a combination that he said left him bedridden for approximately three months.
His neurological symptoms began after the vertigo, however, and continued far beyond that initial period.
“These neurological things started happening after the vertigo, and that was — it was four and a half years of my life,” Green recalled in 2023.
At his lowest point, even moving normally became a struggle.
“I got to the point where I shuffled like I was a 90-year-old man,” he said.
Green and Fox were also involved in a frightening car accident in December 2014 when their vehicle was struck by a drunk driver. However, Green has attributed his health problems to dietary causes rather than the collision.
Years later, the actor still does not have a precise medical label for the neurological episode that dramatically disrupted his life.
His latest comments instead offer a clearer picture of its severity. What began with physical illness and vertigo ultimately became a years-long battle in which Green says he temporarily lost many of the fundamental abilities that had once defined his everyday life.
