“This Is Us” star Justin Hartley is on the mend after suffering a gruesome injury while he tried to stay in shape during the quarantine.
Hartley said on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Tuesday that he built a home gym so he could exercise, but things backfired.
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“I was working out, and I ended up doing something really kind of ridiculous,” he said before looking over at the show's co-executive producer Stephen "tWitch" Boss. “You work out a lot. I tore my bicep off my arm. It was nasty.”
“The muscle came away from the bone,” DeGeneres said.
“The tendon that holds is to the bone apparently, I guess, came off. ... It sounded like if someone just ripped your shirt,” he said.
“Oh, you heard it,” DeGeneres gasped.
“Oh, it was bad,” Hartley, 43, said.
“It was like a curl, like a bicep curl, but I think I jerked the weight or maybe it was too much weight for me or something,” he added.
The actor then provided some vivid imagery about the pain he endured.
“It felt like, I think I was in shock mostly, but it felt like, the way I would describe it is, I stopped ‘cause I heard it. It was an awful sound, and then I felt a little grain of sand in my right here,” he said pointing to his arm.
“And then it turned into, like, a pea and then a marble and then a golf ball and then a tennis ball and then a softball and then a watermelon. It kept feeling like a human head was in there.”
He said he’s about 95% back to where he was and that it took about three months to bounce back after he underwent surgery.
“I’m totally healed now. I’m fine,” he said.
He then recalled watching a video of the surgery he had to undergo, which isn't for the faint of heart.
“They literally were able to grab the tendon and pull it out of my arm, and they showed it to me. It’s pretty disgusting,” he said.
DeGeneres thought that visual may have been a little much for daytime TV.
“You make us cry on your show, then you come be a guest on my show and you make people sick,” she said dryly.
Catch Hartley when the fifth season of "This Is Us" premieres Tuesday night on NBC.