Christina Applegate is opening up about the early days of her battle with multiple sclerosis.
Videos by Suggest
This week, the actress welcomed Dead to Me showrunner Liz Feldman on her MeSsy podcast, which she co-hosts with fellow actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS. During their candid conversation, Applegate revealed the she first saw symptoms of her autoimmune disease while filming the Dead to Me pilot — though she didn’t know what it was at the time.
The actress recalled falling while filming a scene where her character was running across a field. “Hi, first sign of MS!”
Christina Applegate and ‘Dead to Me’ creator Liz Feldman recall how her MS diagnosis impacted the show
“I remember you losing your balance a couple of times but it was very hard to figure out,” Feldman confirmed. “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.”
Applegate was officially diagnosed with MS while filming the third and final season of Dead to Me in 2021. Feldman shared how she understood the severity of Applegate’s condition when it started to affect her work.
“I knew Christina well enough to know that something major had to be going on because she’s an extreme professional,” she shared.
“There’s no handbook for this,” the producer added. “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. It’s so silly, you know, at the end of the day!”
As Applegate’s mobility suffered, due to the disease, Dead to Me adapted scenes to make it easier on the television veteran.
“That would not happen anywhere else,” the actress told Feldman. “So my gratitude toward 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!”