Scott Eastwood is looking back at late girlfriend Jewel Brangman’s tragic 2014 death.
“We were together for three or four years,” Eastwood, 40, said during the Monday, August 3, episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, explaining that Brangman was killed by a defective airbag that went off during what arguably should have been a non-fatal car accident.
“They had a recall on the airbag, and what would have been a fender bender that probably most people would survive … she was essentially shot by the airbag,” Eastwood added.
At the time of the accident, Eastwood had finished working on his 2014 film Fury and was on a different film set.
“As you know, being on a film set when someone passes or something happens, it’s really tough. And this had happened before, actually. I had lost Paul Walker on Fury, and he was one of my close friends,” he noted. (Walker died in a car crash at age 40 in November 2013.)
“When you’re on a film set, you don’t have time to grieve because the show must go on,” Eastwood said. “You can’t fly home, you’re stuck, you’ve got to work.”
The Fury star said he wished he had grieved Brangman’s death in the immediate aftermath of the crash.
“I did a classic defense mechanism — just compartmentalize that until later. Brutal having to deal with that and not being able to go through it. I grieved later,” he recalled. “That’s not a great thing. You do want to grieve with the people that are around that you know and were part of their lives as well. That’s an important part of the grieving process.”
Eastwood said he “completely blacked out” the incident and even missed Brangman’s funeral.
“I had to deal with that grief later,” he concluded.
Brangman,a model and gymnast, was just 26 years old at the time of her death.
Eastman rarely discusses Brangman’s death. He first opened up about the accident in a 2016 interview with GQ Australia.
“I dated a girl a couple of years ago who died in a car accident,” he said when asked about the last time he cried. “The f***ed up thing is, it was a fender bender, and there was a recall on airbags. Her airbag exploded. It shot a projectile through her body. It split her spleen and … I’ve never told anybody that. I’ve lost friends before; I’ve lost some great friends. But, I’ve never lost someone I had been really intimate with. Maybe it’s made it harder for me to date.”
While Eastwood keeps his personal life fairly private, he was previously linked to Jana Kramer, Brittany Brousseau, Charlotte McKinney and Maddie Serviente.
