How he recovered from a stroke in his 30s to become of the Peloton’s star instructors.
“My parents have always been very liberal in the sense of ‘where do you want to go?
What do you want to do?
Photo: Courtesy of Peloton
Try different things,'” says Rose.
“So that’s always been sort of open to me.
“That was sort of the big step into it.”
It was there, in early 2019, that his life took a drastic, unexpected turn.
I then just sort of blacked out.”
When Rose regained consciousness a few moments later, some of his students hadn’t even clocked the incident.
“Because it’s so dark and loud, people didn’t notice,” he says.
As soon as Rose ran out of the room, it hit him: blinding pain.
“It was literally the worst headache you could ever imagine,” he says.
Rose had an audition that afternoon, so he tried to rally.
“I just thought I was fine,” he says.
“I thought I was just tired and stressed out.
But as I was walking down the street, I couldn’t remember where I was.
And I couldn’t remember what I was doing.”
As soon as Rose picked up her call, she sensed the severity of the situation.
“She was like, ‘something’s seriously not right,'” he says.
“I couldn’t even tell her where I was.
She was like, ‘tell me what’s around you’ and I described the Flatiron Building.
Parra insisted he see a doctor but the visit proved less than helpful.
“So I did that.
I was like, ‘yes, I must be stressed out, I must be tired.
And then two days later, I’d convinced myself that I was feeling a lot better.”
But Rose wasn’t better in fact, he seemed to be getting worse.
He went back to the fitness studio and soon began slurring his words.
Rose went straight from the studio to a different medical office to get a second opinion.
“They give you a form that asks you simple things like, ‘what animal is this?’
and I even got one of the animals wrong, which is laughable,” Rose recalls.
“I’ll never forget the doctor pointed to a picture and was like, ‘what’s this?’
and I was like, ‘it’s a hippo.’
I can’t really explain it but I could have sworn I was looking at a hippo.”
Compounding that disbelief, is of course the fact that Rose was so young just 33 at the time.
“I didn’t have any pre-existing issues,” he says.
“I thought I was healthy, I thought I was fine.
I was a little bit tired, but everyone in New York is, right?”
The news was shocking enough, but the price tag for the life-saving treatment was nearly as devastating.
Some companies have a health care option, but it’s so crazily high.
And that was a realization of how screwed you’ve got the option to be.”
It’s been a process and memory was a huge thing that I struggled with.
And obviously being an actor, it was bonkers I struggled for the longest time memorizing lines.
I’ll never forget the first time I actually memorized lines, I just broke down crying.
It felt gratifying."
“They cautioned against it,” he says.
“I went to the hospital a couple of times and they thought I had chronic migraines and vertigo.
These things would suddenly randomly come on that I’ve never experienced.
But I was just like, ‘I’m gonna fight to do this.’
We had our life, we had our apartment, we had our dogs that was a drive.
It was also the drive inside myself like, ‘I’m going to do this.’
It was also a very toxic environment where people were just always angry, upset, annoyed.
I was like, ‘yeah, I’ll send you an audition tape.'”
“This company and I’m not just saying this everything is just good,'” he says.
