Leslie Odom Jr. Contracted Swine Flu During the 2010 Outbreak: ‘You Realize How Vulnerable You Are’

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Robin Marshall/Getty Leslie Odom Jr.

Long before most people knew the term "coronavirus," a different pandemic, H1N1, or swine flu, hit the United States in 2009. And Leslie Odom Jr. was one of the 60.8 million Americans to contract the virus.

The Hamilton star recounted the "very strange" experience that affected him in 2010 on the latest episode of the podcast Hypochondriactor, hosted by actor Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali.

Odom, 39, said that H1N1 felt partially "like the regular flu, which I've had many times," but also something completely different.

"There was a weird component," he said. "Whatever was going on inside me did not feel natural. It felt synthetic."

"Sigourney Weaver in Alien," Hayes offers.

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Odom said that he had all of the usual flu symptoms, like coughing and fever, but the virus also came with intense dizziness that "lasted long after I even felt better" and went beyond the regular flu symptoms.

"The dizziness was like nothing I'd ever experienced," he said. "There was this time, I was finally doing my laundry, this was when the laundry was downstairs, and I made a left turn and then I made another left turn, just in my building, and I went down. Making a left turn I got so dizzy that I just fell."

Odom, who was recently cast in Knives Out 2, said luckily he was between jobs when he contracted H1N1 because he was too sick to leave his bed, and he had intense coughing fits for two months after his initial illness.

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The entire experience affected him emotionally, Odom said, similar to what some people have experienced with COVID-19.

"I think, when your body houses a foreign host, I think something happens psychologically," he said. "You really realize how vulnerable you are, and how I could go from a … veritably healthy guy in my mid-twenties and that I could get this illness that, in some ways, was debilitating, just really affected my trust in the world."

"Thank god … it was super minor," he said.