Actor Ving Rhames has been hospitalized after he collapsed in a Los Angeles restaurant on Wednesday afternoon at the age of 66.
The Pulp Fiction star was reportedly “sitting down and eating with his family when the medical emergency occurred at 1:40 p.m. local time,” per Page Six. The fire department was later called to the scene and transported Rhames to the hospital.
A representative for Rhames, the only actor to appear in all Mission: Impossible movies alongside Tom Cruise, said that he just “overheated” and is now in stable condition.
Rhames catapulted to fame in the 1990s as crime boss Marsellus Wallace in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, in which he uttered the famous line, “I’m gonna get Medieval on your ass.”
Two years later, Rhames starred alongside Tom Cruise in director Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible as the hacker Luther Stickell’s, a role he would go on to reprise with each outing in the franchise over the next two decades, though his role in Ghost Protocol was dramatically reduced to little more than a cameo due to budget cuts.
Everything was up in the air when the Brad Bird-directed “Ghost Protocol” was going into production on account of Cruise’s previous rocky history in the industry a few years earlier. But the film was able to make Cruise a star again. It was assumed that Rhames would return, given he was a critical member of Ethan’s teams in the previous three films.
“In 2010, when Rhames was asked by MovieWeb whether he would return to play Luther, his response indicated that if he did, it would be a reduced role. ‘I may be doing something very small in ‘Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol’ but I will just say that the budget changed dramatically and I’ll leave it at that,’ says Rhames,” reported Slash Film. “When he was asked to expand upon that, his follow-up statement gave the impression that it all came down to money. ‘Hmm… Cha-ching could create that but it’s up to them,’ recounts Rhames.”