‘EXTRA CRISPY’

Jay Leno Opens Up on Burn Accident: ‘My Face Caught on Fire’

“I got a face full of gasoline,” the former late night host recalled, saying when he realized how close he was to his vehicle’s pilot light, he just thought “‘Uh oh.’”

Just over a month after the vehicular fire that burned his face, chest, and hands, funnyman Jay Leno opened up about the experience to NBC’s Today and People magazine. In the first of two interviews published Tuesday, the 72-year-old car aficionado explained to Today how he’d been working on a clogged fuel line underneath his 1907 White Steam Car with a friend when “boom, I got a face full of gas.” To People, he said, “I knew how close I was to the pilot light and I thought, ‘Uh oh.’” The pilot light caught a spark and jumped “and my face caught on fire,” Leno told NBC’s Hoda Kotb. When his friend, Dave Killackey, realized what was happening, he yanked the former Tonight Show host out from under the car and smothered the flames. Leno estimated to People that he’d been under the car and on fire for about 10 seconds. “Any longer than that I could have lost my eye,” he said. After two skin grafting surgeries and a number of sessions in hyperbaric chambers, Leno was back onstage less than two weeks later, joking to reporters outside the venue, “We got two shows tonight: regular and extra crispy.”