Credit: Saeed Adyani / Netflix
November 2022
The Friends alum told Variety that her role on Netflix’s Dead to Me might be “the last one” she’ll ever play. “With my disease, I don’t know how capable I am,” she shared.
Applegate, who said she found out she had MS while she was at work, went on to recall the symptoms she experienced before receiving her diagnosis.
“I didn’t know what was happening to me. That January, my toes got numb, and I ignored it. The balls of my foot got numb, and I ignored it. All of a sudden, I’d be, like, falling over,” she explained. “People were like, ‘Oh, it’s just neuropathy.’ At this point, they had to take me with a wheelchair to set because I couldn’t walk if the set was far. I was sleeping all the time, and I gained 40 pounds — a lot of things happened.”
While she doesn’t think she’ll watch the final season of Dead to Me — “It’s too hard for me” — the California native shared that finishing the show was the only option for her.
“I couldn’t have done it without this need to tell our story. They were gonna pull the plug, you know? Because it was like torture — and they felt like they were torturing me, too. But I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no: We have to finish this story. It’s too important to our hearts; too important to our souls,” she told Variety. “And we have to give this gift, not only to ourselves — there are people that love these characters, and we’ve got to let them have their closure too.’ So, if that meant me having to take a break in the middle of the day so I could go sleep — or me just leaving because I couldn’t do anymore — then that’s what we had to do.”
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