Christina Applegate and the Power of Disabled Hollywood Stars

Christina Applegate has rarely been off our screens throughout the different eras of her life and ours. After emerging in commercials and a soap opera as a child, she played a teenager on the successful and long-running American sitcom Married with Children. Then, she won an Emmy for her guest appearance on Friends. Other starring roles have included the Anchorman films.  

Over several years, as she recounts it, the tingling and numbness she was experiencing worsened. Finally, she was diagnosed during filming for another successful TV show, Dead to Me, that captured another era of life. She had Multiple Sclerosis.   

This ever-presence in our lives gives an influential and compelling power. In a world where disabled people don’t control their narratives, the disabled celebrity might be the most revolutionary of digital storytellers.   

There’s an artificial intimacy between celebrity and observer, particularly because stars like Applegate have acted since infancy, meaning our lives have been wrapped around theirs for decades.  

So, they can shape their narratives and speak on their terms. Still, celebrities have a knack for making individuals feel seen and understood — even if it’s only a fleeting illusion of intimacy. Thus, celebrities as digital storytellers can be gritty, honest, tough and tender.  

Hollywood celebrities like Christina Applegate are expanding representation — with an intimate, up close, staring-at-you-right-in-the-face honesty about the reality of having a disability.    

Even if just in a moment of recognition when you see the brand of the cane she uses – Neo Walk by the way – or that she has found that elusive thing: a durable, practical and attractive shoe — the power remains with her.  

The way that Applegate offers snippets of her life feels important. That she can reflect honestly on living with a disability in her own words and can share her hard-fought lessons.  

In her current social media presence, deeper truths are conveyed than most media will permit: the media only allows for archetypes or binaries. So often, non-disabled people don’t think of disabled people as complex human beings with conflicting emotions or of the nitty-gritty disabled mind.    

Honesty such as this is essential: “This is the first time anyone’s going to see me the way I am,” she said. “I put on 40 pounds; I can’t walk without a cane. I want people to know that I am very aware of all of that.”  

Seeing those differences in your reflection can be jarring, and seeing how those differences are warped on social media is more so. 

To be a disabled woman is to be fair game. When Applegate shared her exchange with a troll, who accused her of getting ‘bad plastic surgery.’ It felt commonplace — an everyday piece of ableism that doesn’t quite land how it used to; or should.    

In a newspaper interview, Applegate said of the acceptance process: “it’s not like I came on the other side of it, like, ‘Woohoo, I’m totally fine,’” she declared. “Acceptance? No. I’m never going to accept this. I’m pissed.”   

It reminds me of something I said at 16 and will resonate with many disabled people: I couldn’t have a moment of ‘I don’t wanna do this.’ My younger self never articulated anger about my condition and what it stripped away; to say, “I’m pissed”, would have elicited lectures about how I simply didn’t have a choice. 

There was no time to process the medical interventions littered throughout my youth. That repression or resentment, or some of it, would’ve been healed rather beautifully by a cathartic ability to say at intervals: fuck this.  

Scathing honesty is essential because so much of the disabled experience is hidden — we’re taught to hide and downplay it. 

The scraped-back hair, the bone-deep exhaustion, the days spent in darkness because you pushed, the lethargy that sets into your limbs, the fog, the coldness of your bathroom tiles as you collapse from exhaustion.     

Fame is an evergreen, often bleak subject for the camera. But there’s a growing honesty when it comes to those staring-at-you-right-in-the-face moments. 

For example, Selena Gomez sharing her experience with lupus. The snippets that the public received mainly focused on her mental health, which includes a bipolar disorder diagnosis.    

Disabled Hollywood stars, whose voices and faces have defined generations, from Michael J. Fox to Selma Blair, are telling their human stories through photoshoots, candid, confessional interviews, public appearances and red-carpet walks. 

They are splintering those stereotypes, archetypes and old Hollywood ideals — with plainspokenness.  

Christina Applegate, Selena Gomez, Selma Blair and Michael J. Fox might be the forerunners for something which will continue to develop. 

More intimate, up close, staring-at-you-right-in-the-face disabled celebrities who can continue to move through the world on their terms enable us to do the same. 

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