Jerry O’Connell quit smoking because Rebecca Romijn wouldn’t touch him

Jerry O’Connell is sharing the unique method that helped him quit smoking. 

The Star Trek: Lower Decks actor, 52, explained that he hired a hypnotist in order to help him stop smoking 14 years ago — and that it actually worked. 

“I struggled with nicotine for decades, struggled with it, had to get hypnotized,” O’Connell said on a recent episode of Sophia Bush’s Work in Progress podcast. “Haven’t had a ciggy in, like, 14 years.”

He noted that his wife, actress Rebecca Romijn, had also given him extra incentive to kick the habit at the time by giving him a serious ultimatum.

“My wife said she would not touch me if I smoked, and that lasted about two months,” O’Connell recalled. “And by the way — no contact. My wife said, ‘I’m not touching you anymore until you quit smoking.’”

He initially thought that Romijn was just joking. “Then after, like, two weeks, there was no physical contact,” he added. “After about three and a half weeks, I was like, ‘I gotta do something.’ And I tried to quit, and I couldn’t quit.” 

So O’Connell reached out to a friend who had quit smoking and she, in turn, gave him the hypnotist’s number. 

“I went to see [the hypnotist] and I had to bring a photo of my children and my wife,” he remembered. “And I sat down on her… recliner and she put her headphones on me and there was, like, spa music. And she was like, ‘I’m going to count to ten, nine, eight…’ and I fell asleep.”

O’Connell had mixed feelings about the experience afterward. “I woke up,” he said, “And I was like, ‘That was baloney. What a joke. I can’t believe I just gave some old lady $800. What a waste of money!’”

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That is, until the next time he went to smoke. “Got to my car, put the ciggy in my mouth, brought the lighter up, and… I wanted it so bad,” he said. “I couldn’t light it.”

He added, “I swear to you! I’ve never been hypnotized for anything else. I know they do, like, everything.”

O’Connell and Romijn married in 2007. The couple share twin daughters — Dolly Rebecca Rose and Charlie Tamara Tulip — who they welcomed in 2008. 

Listen to O’Connell talk about how he quit smoking in the podcast above.