Christina Applegate revealed her MS diagnosis in 2021.
She has since opened up, using her platform to get real about the devastating autoimmune disease.
Before her diagnosis, however, there were warning signs.
But she missed those signs while filming. The grueling hours that go into making television made her symptoms look like routine exhaustion — at first.
Christina Applegate missed early warning signs
Speaking on the Wednesday, December 11 edition of the MeSsy podcast, Christina Applegate told co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler and guest Liz Feldman about how her fall on the set of the latter’s Dead To Me should have been a wakeup call.
“I remember falling that day,” the actress said, recalling it happening as she was filming a running sequence in a field.
In retrospect, Applegate understands: “Hi, first sign of MS! So, not to bring everybody down, but there it was.”
In August of 2021, Christina Applegate revealed that she was suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
Sigler revealed her own MS battle years earlier, in January of 2016. Thus, their shared podcast.
Meanwhile, Feldman is the creator of Dead To Me. That three-season Netflix series (yes, Netflix used to give three whole seasons to shows) was where Applegate began experiencing physical symptoms. But not, as they both initially assumed, because of the series itself.
It wasn’t the late hours — it was MS
“I remember you losing your balance when we were shooting the pilot a couple of times,” Feldman told Applegate.
“It was very hard to figure it out,” she explained, “because, you know, I remember one time, it was really late at night.”
Feldman detailed: “We’d been shooting probably 14 or 15 hours … it seemed completely reasonable that anybody would be collapsing.” Yes, filming — especially for television — can involve truly brutal hours.
“It was MS,” Christina Applegate then acknowledged. Even so, she continued working on the Netflix series through the third season — by which time she had received her diagnosis.
“I could just sense A, that she was scared, and B, that something was wrong … that something in her body was not working the way that she wanted it to,” Feldman described. As the series creator, she was unsure of what to do.
“There’s no handbook for this,” she admitted. “I can’t compare it to any experience I’ve ever gone through with a person before.” So, she “just always tried to put [Christina Applegate’s] health first in my mind” as they filmed.
The Netflix series was not as important as Christina Applegate and her health
Applegate praised how Feldman and the show’s crew went above and beyond to accommodate her. At one point, production halted for a week while she recovered.
“That would not happen anywhere else, so my gratitude towards you guys being humans – because you should be humans and love other humans – is astounding,” Applegate expressed.
She concluded: “I can’t even tell you … that’s not the normal reaction.” But it really should be.
