A rare appearance by the actor Christina Applegate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, brought heart and humor to the ceremony’s celebration of TV history.
One of the first presenters of Monday’s 75th Emmy Awards responded to a standing ovation by gently mocking the audience. As the crowd cheered, the actor Christina Applegate added some wry humor to her expression of gratitude. “Thank you so much. Oh my god, you’re totally shaming me with disability by standing up,” she said. Applegate, who has multiple sclerosis and walked onto the stage with a cane, continued: “It’s fine. Body not by Ozempic. Okay, let’s go!”
But the audience continued to clap. So the teary-eyed Applegate, who was onstage to present the award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, added another joking admonition: “We don’t have to applaud every time I do something.”
Applegate’s heart and humor were a welcome sight. In the years since being diagnosed with MS in 2021, right as she was filming the third and final season of the Netflix series Dead to Me, she’s stayed largely out of the public eye (with the exception of a few appearances tied to the season’s release in late 2022). And Applegate had previously suggested that last year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards would be the last ceremony she attends as an actor. (She arrived at the show sporting a cane with the letters “FU MS” on it.) At the Emmys, where her presence was a surprise to many, Applegate acknowledged the physical and emotional realities of an autoimmune disorder in a room of people whose careers sometimes depend on their abilities to downplay the frailty of their bodies.
Even before her Emmys appearance, Applegate has been candid about the toll that MS has taken on her body, her mental health, and her ability to do the thing she loves: perform. The MS diagnosis isn’t her first public health battle: In 2008, Applegate was diagnosed with breast cancer while starring on Samantha Who?, the ABC comedy series for which she earned two of her eight Emmy nominations. She survived after a double mastectomy at 36. Reflecting on that experience later, the actor said the MS diagnosis made her reconsider pushing herself so hard to work while recovering. “I should have asked for some more time after one of my surgeries,” she told Vanity Fair in 2023. “I went back to work two weeks after my reconstruction. And that was really difficult for me to do.”
Read: The Emmys speech that showed the power of live TV
Dead to Me, in which Applegate played a hot-tempered widow searching for answers in her husband’s hit-and-run death, earned her a nomination in this year’s Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category. (She lost to Abbott Elementary’s Quinta Brunson.) In many ways, the dramedy was the perfect vehicle for Applegate’s talents: a blisteringly funny, searching exploration of an unlikely bond between difficult women. But production on the series was incredibly taxing for her, even after filming was shut down for several months while she sought treatment. Some days, she needed a wheelchair on set; some days, she wasn’t able to make it at all. Considered alongside those challenges, and the distress she put her body through in earlier decades, Applegate’s joke about the audience applauding every one of her achievements took on even more meaning.
And during a night that saw the Emmys repeatedly gesture at the past by reuniting the casts of shows like Cheers, Martin, and Ally McBeal, it was fitting to open the ceremony with a performer whose first television appearance came as a baby: Before she was Sue Ellen Crandell in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead or Kelly Bundy on Married… with Children, Applegate made her onscreen debut as a literal infant, a fact that fellow actor Jason Bateman referenced later in the Emmys ceremony. “My first acting role was on Little House on the Prairie,” he said. “I was 11—compared to Christina Applegate, I was a late bloomer.”
Television—if not the entertainment industry as a whole—can often seem as though it requires actors, and especially women, to deny the basic truths of getting older. This year’s ceremony celebrated TV history by reminding viewers that some of it is history. Over her five decades working in TV, Applegate witnessed and contributed to a lot of that history—and the beauty of her appearance was the actor’s willingness to address some of the sacrifices made along the way.
The Most Truthful Moment of the Emmys
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A rare appearance by the actor Christina Applegate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, brought heart and humor to the ceremony’s celebration of TV history.
One of the first presenters of Monday’s 75th Emmy Awards responded to a standing ovation by gently mocking the audience. As the crowd cheered, the actor Christina Applegate added some wry humor to her expression of gratitude. “Thank you so much. Oh my god, you’re totally shaming me with disability by standing up,” she said. Applegate, who has multiple sclerosis and walked onto the stage with a cane, continued: “It’s fine. Body not by Ozempic. Okay, let’s go!”
But the audience continued to clap. So the teary-eyed Applegate, who was onstage to present the award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, added another joking admonition: “We don’t have to applaud every time I do something.”
Applegate’s heart and humor were a welcome sight. In the years since being diagnosed with MS in 2021, right as she was filming the third and final season of the Netflix series Dead to Me, she’s stayed largely out of the public eye (with the........
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