The Dead to Me star, who was diagnosed with MS in 2021, said the SAG Awards was likely her last awards show as an actor as she deals with the impact of her disease
Christina Applegate had a special message for her multiple sclerosis diagnosis while attending the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
During Sunday night’s show, the actress hit the red carpet with her 12-year-old daughter Sadie Grace LeNoble. The 51-year-old wore a floor-length velvet tuxedo dress and paired the look with the cane she carries due to the balance issues the disease can cause. Affixed to the cane were sticker letters: “FU MS.”
Applegate, who confirmed her MS diagnosis in 2021, revealed earlier this month that the SAG Awards would most likely be her last as she continues to deal with the impacts from the disease.
“It’s my last awards show as an actor probably, so it’s kind of a big deal,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “Right now, I couldn’t imagine getting up at 5 a.m. and spending 12 to 14 hours on a set; I don’t have that in me at this moment.”
The Dead to Me actress was diagnosed with MS while filming her third season of the Netflix dramedy. She told the outlet that she waited months to watch her performance after it was released.
“I don’t like seeing myself struggling,” she explained. “Also, I gained 40 lbs. because of inactivity and medications, and I didn’t look like myself, and I didn’t feel like myself.”
When the actress finally watched the show, she did so alone and had to stop periodically whenever it became too painful.
“At some point I was able to distance myself from my own ego, and realize what a beautiful piece of television it was,” Applegate added. “All the scenes I wasn’t in were so much fun to see and experience for the very first time.”
Back in December, she appeared virtually on The Kelly Clarkson Show and revealed that she typically uses her job as an actress to distract her from real-life problems.
“I’ve probably been going through grief and trauma my whole life, and acting was the place that I got to go to not feel it, you know?” Applegate said at the time, noting that she used acting to avoid dealing with past breakups, trauma, deaths and breast cancer.
She admitted to Clarkson that, for the first time, going to work every day gave her the space to grieve, channeling the emotions behind her MS diagnosis into her character.
“The beauty of Dead to Me is that it gave me almost this weird platform of dealing with it, where I didn’t have to be on all the time and I didn’t have to make all the jokes and I could fall apart in a scene,” Applegate explained. “And it was, like, me. It was my soul actually falling apart, unfortunately, in front of the world, but it was cathartic in a beautiful way.”
