Before the Oscar, before the platinum records, before he was headlining blockbusters, Jamie Foxx was just a man with a mic making people laugh. This October, he’s going back to where it all began.
The trailer just dropped for “Jamie Foxx: Take Care of Yourself,” Foxx’s new stand-up special hitting Hulu October 7, and it finds the veteran comic dancing across the stage while cracking jokes about getting older, in what Hulu is billing as “his most honest, evolved, and unforgettable chapter yet.”
“I live in an all-white neighborhood, and a real gangbanger walked up on me,” Foxx says in the trailer. “I said, ‘How did you get in here?’ My white friends didn’t know what was going [on]: ‘Is this your cousin?’ No, this is danger!”
What makes this special hit different isn’t just the jokes, it’s everything Foxx had to survive to get back on that stage. In 2023, he suffered a medical emergency later revealed to be a brain bleed that led to a stroke. He’s said he doesn’t remember 20 days of that period, and when he came out of it, he was in a wheelchair, unable to walk. Comedy, he’s said, was one of the things that carried him through it.
His first return to stand-up came via 2024’s Netflix special “What Had Happened Was…,” where he walked out and declared, “I’m back!” before addressing the swirl of online speculation about his health. “Take Care of Yourself” picks up where that special left off, and even the title borrows from one of Foxx’s own punchlines about aging.
Comedy has always been the foundation underneath everything else Foxx built. He was doing stand-up before “In Living Color” put him on TV in the early ’90s, which led to his own sitcom, “The Jamie Foxx Show,” running five seasons. From there he crossed into dramatic acting with “Any Given Sunday” and “Ali,” before 2004 turned into one of the great years in recent Hollywood history: a Best Actor Oscar for “Ray” and a Supporting Actor nomination for “Collateral” in the same year, all while building out a music career on the side. Comedy, drama, music, TV, movies, Foxx made juggling all of it look like a single, continuous career.
“Take Care of Yourself” marks his fifth stand-up special across three decades, following “Straight From the Foxxhole” in 1993, “I Might Need Security” in 2002, and “Jamie Foxx Unleashed: Lost, Stolen and Leaked!” in 2003.
The special lands as part of Hulu’s “Hularious” comedy slate, joining a lineup that includes Bill Burr, Nikki Glaser, Jim Gaffigan, Sebastian Maniscalco, Kumail Nanjiani, Ilana Glazer, Roy Wood Jr., Hannah Berner, Ralph Barbosa, Chris Distefano, Zarna Garg, Jessica Kirson, Matteo Lane, Atsuko Okatsuka, Frankie Quiñones, and Andrew Santino. But Foxx brings something to the lineup none of the others can claim: a guy who survived something genuinely terrifying, fought his way all the way back, and returned to the exact stage where his career started.
“Jamie Foxx: Take Care of Yourself” premieres October 7 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers in the U.S., and on Disney+ internationally.