'I'M PROUD OF MYSELF!'

LIFE HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN EASY FOR THE ACTOR BUT HIS LATEST ROLE HAS HELPED HIM HEAL

- Naomi Toy

Given his own deeply personal and often traumatic experiences with aspects of the health system, the last place you would think actor Samuel Johnson would choose to spend time is within the four walls and wards of Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital. He has been a patient, treated for drug and alcohol addiction as well as a brain injury when he was hit by a car in October 2021. He's been a loving brother too, beside his sister Connie as she battled various forms of cancer over two decades that would eventually take her life when she was aged just 33 in 2017.

Yet, he agreed to step on to the frontline and meet with patients and staff for the three-part documentary The Hospital: In the Deep End. He expected to get a fresh perspective and insights into a system he has been sadly too familiar with. He did not expect that lifelong wounds he'd carried all his life, about the loss of his mum, Merrill, to suicide when he was just 3, might begin to heal.