Christina Applegate continues to get candid about living with multiple sclerosis three years after going public with her diagnosis.
Appearing on Good Morning America Wednesday, the Emmy-winning actor shared that she was likely experiencing symptoms “six or seven years” before she was formally diagnosed with the disease.
“I noticed, especially the first season [of Netflix’s Dead to Me], we’d be shooting, and I would buckle. My leg would buckle,” she explained. “I really just put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather. Then nothing would happen for months, and I didn’t pay attention. But when it hit this hard, I had to pay attention.”
Applegate became visibly emotional when sharing the experience of filming the final season of Dead to Me in 2021. Before work on the last spate of episodes began, she noticed “tingling on my toes.”
By the time shooting on the series commenced, however, she said: “I was being brought to set in a wheelchair.”
“I couldn’t move that far,” she added. So I had to tell everybody because I needed help. I needed someone to help me stand, and I needed someone to help me get there.”
Watch Christina Applegate’s “Good Morning America” interview below.
Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is a chronic autoimmune condition that impairs communication between the body and the brain. Symptoms include tremors, fatigue, vision loss, slurred speech and weakness in limbs.
Applegate once again credited her Sweetest Thing co-star, Selma Blair, who was diagnosed with MS in 2018, with urging her to get tested.
“I said, ‘Really? The odds? The two of us from the same movie?’ Come on, that doesn’t happen to two people,” she said. “If not for her, it could’ve been way worse.”
Since publicly addressing her diagnosis, Applegate has emerged as an outspoken advocate for people with MS. She and Sopranos actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has the disease, are the co-hosts of a new podcast, “MeSsy,” in which they pledge to get “vulnerable about the curveballs that life can throw,” including MS.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Applegate has fully come to terms with her condition.
“I’m never going to wake up and go, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m just going to tell you that,” she said. “I wake up, and I’m reminded of it every day. So it’s not going to happen. But I might get to a place where I will function a little bit better.”