US actress Christina Applegate might be taking her final bow soon. Photo: AFP
Christina Applegate might be taking her final bow soon.
The Emmy winner’s role as Jen Harding on Dead To Me could be her last following her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, she told Variety.
“Jen Harding is the one, who – who knows, quite possibly the last one I’ll play,” Applegate, 50, said.
“I don’t know how capable I am,” she said, on the verge of tears. “This was a gift to me.”
Noting that filming the third-and-final season of the Emmy-nominated Netflix hit was “as hard as you would possibly think it would be,” Applegate told Variety she was at work when she learned of her diagnosis, which she went public with in August 2021.
“I didn’t know what was happening to me,” she said, recalling symptoms she’d ignored such as numb toes.
“I was sleeping all the time, and I gained 40 pounds (18kg) – a lot of things happened. I got diagnosed while we were working. ... And then it was about kind of learning – all of us learning – what I was going to be capable of doing.”
Netflix “even let us take a break for a couple of months so that I could mourn, and find treatment,” said Applegate, who won a guest actress Emmy for Friends in 2003.
Applegate said she, co-star Linda Cardellini and creator Liz Feldman all wanted Dead To Me and its characters to have “closure,” so they forged ahead with the final season, which is streaming now. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
