Tracy Morgan: The Walmart Truck That Nearly Took Everything

When Tracy Morgan sat down with Saturday Night Live’s Marcello Hernández for an Actors on Actors conversation that aired Wednesday, June 10, he didn’t shy away from the weight of what happened on the New Jersey Turnpike over a decade ago. The comedian opened up about the 2014 accident with a clarity that only comes from surviving something most people don’t.

That night, Morgan was riding in a limousine with friends Ardie Fuqua and James McNair—who performed under the stage name Jimmy Mack—heading home after a comedy show in Delaware. A Walmart truck doing 70 miles per hour with 85,000 pounds of frozen food in the back slammed into them. The impact was catastrophic. McNair was killed instantly; the injuries Morgan described were brutal and unflinching. He wasn’t looking for sympathy in the retelling. He was bearing witness.

Both Morgan and Fuqua ended up in medically induced comas. Morgan’s lasted 10 days. Fuqua’s stretched to 20 days. But the numbers don’t capture the aftermath. Morgan sustained a shattered femur, a broken nose, a traumatic brain injury, and several broken ribs. The road back meant months of physical therapy, relearning how to walk and talk. That’s the part people often gloss over—the grinding, private work of becoming yourself again.

What’s striking about Morgan’s willingness to revisit this now is how he’s reframed it. He sued Walmart for negligence, and the parties settled in 2015 for an undisclosed amount—though Morgan hinted it was generous enough to change his life. An investigation had shown the truck driver had been on the road for 13 and a half hours, just under the 14-hour legal limit but plenty long enough to matter. The driver pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, but the facts spoke louder.

Morgan’s insight, shared in that conversation with Hernández, reveals something deeper than gratitude for survival. He talked about surrounding himself with people who still need to do comedy out of necessity, people with bills to pay and hunger to prove. He doesn’t have to be funny anymore—the Walmart settlement saw to that. But he chooses to be, chooses to show up, chooses to share a stage with people clawing their way up. That’s not just a career decision. That’s a philosophy born from understanding how fragile everything is, and how lucky you have to be to get a second act at all.