After making a rare public appearance at the Emmys in January, Christina Applegate is opening up about her experience living with multiple sclerosis. The Dead to Me actress was diagnosed with the disease, also known as MS, in 2021. In a new interview with Good Morning America, Applegate said Monday that she now lives “kind of in hell.”
“I live kind of in hell. I’m not out a lot, so this is a little difficult, just for my system,” she said of her sit-down interview with Robin Roberts. “But of course, the support is wonderful, and I’m really grateful.”
Applegate was joined by The Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler — who was diagnosed with MS in 2002 at the age of 20 — as she discussed her viral Emmys moment. The Anchorman star first announced her diagnosis on social media and has intermittently shared updates on her health since then. But her return to the stage for the 2023 Emmys, which took place earlier this year owing to strikes, marked one of her first appearances alongside her peers in years and resulted in a standing ovation. At the time, Applegate handled the applause with her signature deadpan humor, noting, “Oh my God, you’re totally shaming me with my disability by standing up.” But Applegate told Roberts she “kind of blacked out” onstage.
“People said, ‘Oh, you were so funny,’ and I’m like, I don’t even know what I said,” she remembered. “I don’t know what I was doing. I got so freaked out that I didn’t even know what was happening anymore.”
“I felt really beloved, and it was a beautiful thing,” Applegate added before cracking another joke. “I’m just gonna say this: That crowd stood up for everybody.”
In May of last year, Applegate told Vanity Fair she probably wouldn’t be working on-camera anymore, though she was proud to go out with a bang along her Dead to Me co-star Linda Cardellini, whom she described as “by far the greatest actress I’ve ever worked with in my entire life, if not the greatest human I’ve ever known.” We’ll see what else the actress has to say about how she has navigated a potentially debilitating disease — and life after acting — when the full GMA interview airs on Tuesday.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Jamie-Lynn Sigler was diagnosed with MS in 2016 at the age of 20. She publicly revealed her diagnosis in 2016 but received the diagnosis in 2002.
