Topics: Celebrity, Christina Applegate, Health, TV And Film, Netflix
Christina Applegate has revealed she noticed first MS symptom while filming the Dead To Me pilot episode.
Applegate, 53, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the summer of 2021, while working the third and final season of the Netflix comedy-drama.
She's been extremely candid when discussing her health issues in order to raise awareness on the condition, revealing that her symptoms dated back years before she actually knew what she was dealing with.
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On Tuesday (10 December), Applegate opened up some more about what it was like when her symptoms first started appearing on set in 2019.
She revealed on her Messy podcast, which she co-hosts with actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS.
She explained that she was running across a field for a scene for the pilot episode and fell down - which she now recognises as an early sign of her autoimmune condition.
"I remember falling that day," Applegate recalled "Hi, first sign of MS!"
Her close friend, Liz Feldman, who is also the creator of Dead To Me, was present during the moment and recounted: "I remember you losing your balance a couple of times but it was very hard to figure out.
"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."
Discussing Applegate's diagnosis, Feldman continued: "There’s no handbook for this.
"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."
Applegate took the moment to thank the show's producers for being so accommodating to her condition, especially when her mobility started declining towards the end of the show.
"That would not happen anywhere else," she praised. "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!"
Applegate previously recalled being able to 'brush off' the symptoms in January 2021, but just before she started shooting the third season of Dead To Me, she felt as though she had been 'hit by a truck and didn’t know what was going on'.
Speaking to Variety, Applegate shared: "It was very scary for me, because this body that I had known was no longer mine.
"We had to kind of work around that until, finally, I had answers.
"I found that I had MS while we were shooting on a Monday. I went home, and the doctor said, 'I need to do this meeting with you'.
"I could feel that this Zoom was not going to be good news. It sucked, I’m not going to lie."
