Christina Applegate was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2021 — but the actress has revealed that she first noticed mysterious symptoms more than two years earlier, while shooting the pilot episode of Dead To Me.
The actress, 55, spoke about her experience on her podcast, Messy, which she cohosts with fellow actress and MS sufferer Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Applegate was in conversation with her close friend, Dead To Me creator Liz Feldman when she revealed that her symptoms first started appearing back in 2019 — but she dismissed them for quite some time before seeing medical help.
Applegate said that she unexpectedly fell while running across a field during a scene of Netflix’s award-nominated dark comedy-drama series — and now realizes it was an early sign of the autoimmune condition. “I remember falling that day,” she said. “Hi, first sign of MS!”
Feldman recalled the moment too. “I remember you losing your balance a couple of times but it was very hard to figure out,” she said. “I remember one time it was like really late at night, we’d been shooting probably 14 or 15 hours, it seemed completely reasonable that anybody would be collapsing.”
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It wasn’t until 2021, while shooting the third and final season of Dead To Me, that Applegate was diagnosed after experiencing back problems, tingling and other symptoms. Feldman quickly assured the actress that her health took priority over the show. “There’s no handbook for this,” said Feldman. “I could just sense that A, she was scared and B, that something was wrong, something in her body was not working the way that she wanted it to. I told her so many times that it’s just a TV show; we’re making a TV show and it’s so silly, you know, at the end of the day!” She added: “I knew Christina well enough to know that something major had to be going on because she’s an extreme professional.”
The support Applegate received from Feldman and the rest of the Dead To Me cast and crew continued right up until the end of the show, with the producers adapting her scenes to make her more comfortable as her mobility deteriorated. “That would not happen anywhere else,” said Applegate. “So my gratitude towards you guys being humans — because you should be humans and love other humans! — is, like, I can’t even tell you, that’s not the normal reaction!”
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Since her diagnosis, Applegate has retired from acting, but hasn’t ruled over voiceover work. In an earlier episode of the Messy podcast, she shared with Sigler that she is in pain “every single day”. “I lay in bed screaming,” she said. “Like, the sharp pains, the ache, the squeezing.”
