The Somewhere in Queens star got a stent to avoid tragedy.
If you need a reminder of how important it is to take your heart health seriously, just ask Ray Romano.
The star of the sitcom classic Everybody Loves Raymond and the new film Somewhere in Queens revealed he recently had a heart procedure after discovering one of his arteries was nearly completely closed up.
“I had to have a stent put in, at 90% blockage,” Romano said during an interview for the podcast WTF with Marc Maron. “I got kinda lucky that we found it before having a heart attack.”
The actor recalled that he’d been having chest pains, which flared up significantly while shooting his new film, Somewhere in Queens. Romano told Entertainment Tonight earlier this month that the discomfort became pronounced enough that he called his agent at 1 a.m. because he couldn’t sleep.
“I had to go to my cardiologist in New York and get on the treadmill and do a stress test because I was getting chest pains,” he said.
In his conversation with Maron, Romano admitted that he’d gotten warnings about his high cholesterol for two decades. His doctor would suggest medication, but Romano always demurred, preferring to try and improve things himself by making healthy tweaks to his diet. But inevitably, he’d always fall back on the unhealthy routine that ended up causing his arterial blockage.
“Now because I’m on the meds, my cholesterol dropped right away,” he said. “If I could go back 20 years, I would have gone on the meds. It was hard for me to sustain that diet stuff.”
As he and Maron continued their chat about aging and its effects on the body, Romano confessed that this incident with his heart was the first time he consciously acknowledged that he was getting older.
“Man, saying 50 was weird, but saying 60… it sounds foreign, it sounds fake, you know?” he said. “I know in my head I don’t feel that old. In my body, I’m getting a couple of notices that I am that old.”
But his age — which, for the record, is 65 — isn’t slowing Romano down professionally. He’s pulling triple duty on Somewhere in Queens, which hits theaters April 21, as the star, director, and co-writer.
Co-starring Laurie Metcalf, Jennifer Esposito, and Sebastian Maniscalco, the film features Romano as a father whose son has a promising future in college basketball — until setbacks throw that into question, creating unforeseen consequences in the family dynamic. Romano told PEOPLE that the story was inspired by his own experience with his son, who was a high school hoops star but couldn’t make the transition to a college team.
“My thought was, what if this [movie] was about a guy who, that’s all he had — he felt invisible in his real life and the only time he felt any kind of purpose or attention was through his son and the basketball, and it was ending,” he recalled. “And that was the jumping-off point of the story.”
