Soon after Christina Applegate received the “devastating” diagnosis that she had multiple sclerosis in June 2021, her friend Lance Bass reached out. “You need to talk to Jamie,” he told her.
Jamie-Lynn Sigler had been living with the disease for two decades, so when Applegate got in touch, The Sopranos actress, who lives in Austin, was ready to help. “I wanted to give her tools and things that I’ve learned that have helped me,” says Sigler, 42. And, says Applegate, “we haven’t stopped talking since.”
In an Exclusive interview with PEOPLE magazine, the two opened up about the disease that brought them together and how their friendship continues to help them through it. “MS brought us together.” Their relationship has since grown into a powerful friendship that’s been a lifeline for both actresses as they face their futures with the disease. “We have each other and that’s helped us so much,” says Applegate, 52, who learned she had the disease when she was in the midst of filming the last season of her Netflix series Dead to Me.
It’s their friendship and their shared struggles that have inspired a new podcast, MeSsy, which debuted in March. “We would talk on the phone for two hours, and we’d be laughing and crying and we were like, “This is helping us. Let’s record this. Let’s do it,” Applegate says. Adds Sigler, who kept her own diagnosis hidden for 15 years before revealing it in a PEOPLE story in 2016, “the way that Christina disarms me and allows me to talk about the hard stuff, I needed desperately.”
Although the podcast (which will also feature conversations with famous friends, and former co-stars like Martin Short and Edie Falco) provides an unflinching —and darkly humorous — look at the challenges of MS (case in point: an upcoming episode riffs on adult diapers), the actresses say it is not a podcast just about MS.
“It’s not about the specific experience we’re having,” Sigler says. “It’s us facing something hard and it’s about figuring out how to still push through. I’ve never been more … nervous isn’t the word, but like a good anxious about any project I’ve ever put out more than this, because I care so deeply about it. We are sharing the deepest parts of ourselves.”
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