Applegate has revealed the symptom she noticed years before her diagnosis. Credit: Phillip Faraone / Getty
Christina Applegate noticed a tiny symptom that signaled multiple sclerosis years before doctors diagnosed her.
Christina Applegate, 53, known for Dead to Me and Married… with Children, revealed she had MS in 2021 after being diagnosed months earlier.
She struggled filming Dead to Me‘s final season due to the disease, which affects the central nervous system.
Recently, she shared that she’d ignored “tiny” symptoms of MS for up to seven years before her diagnosis.
In a past interview with Good Morning America, Christina Applegate reflected on early MS signs while speaking with her friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has the condition.
“I probably had it for six or seven years,” she said. “During Dead to Me‘s first season, my leg would buckle on set.”
She brushed it off as exhaustion or dehydration, saying, “Then months would go by with nothing, so I ignored it—until it hit hard and I had to pay attention.”
The actress got emotional as she shared how, by the end of filming, she needed a wheelchair to reach the set.
“My symptoms began in early 2021 with just tingling in my toes,” Applegate told Robin Roberts.
“By summer, when filming started, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair—I couldn’t walk that far,” she said about Dead to Me.
Though she lives with “excruciating pain,” she admitted, “I’m used to it now.”
Applegate first shared her MS diagnosis in an interview with the New York Times.
At the time, she was still filming the final season of Dead To Me, though treatment made it tough to continue.
“There was this sense of, ‘Let’s get her medicine so she gets better,’” she said. “But there is no better. I needed time to grieve the loss of that part of me.”
Still, she felt a strong sense of responsibility.
“I had an obligation to Liz, to Linda, to our story,” she said, even as producers considered halting production.
“If people only see a ‘cripple,’ that’s not on me,” she added. “I just hope they enjoy the ride.”
In 2022, Applegate told Kelly Clarkson that acting helped her escape real-life struggles.
“I’ve probably been dealing with grief and trauma my whole life,” she said. “Acting let me avoid feeling it.”
She used work to block out pain from breakups, loss, trauma, and her battle with breast cancer.
She added, “Dead to Me gave me a way to process it all. I didn’t have to be ‘on’ or crack jokes.”
“I could fall apart in a scene, and that was really me—my soul breaking down. It was painful, but cathartic.”
Christina Applegate’s strength in facing MS with honesty and vulnerability inspires many.
