Emma Caulfield Ford isn’t letting multiple sclerosis get her down.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the 49-year-old former “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star reveals her MS diagnosis and opens up about dealing with the disease.
She recalls first feeling the symptoms back in 2010, but at the time, the people she consulted assumed she had Bell’s palsy.
Finally, after having an MRI done, she got a call from her doctor informing her of the true diagnosis.
“He was like: ‘You have MS.’ Just like that. It was like an out-of-body experience,” Caulfield Ford says. I’m like, ‘No, that’s not possible.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He was very matter of fact about it. ‘Well, you can get a second opinion…’ It was literally a kind of nightmare…. It turns out it was something major. Then I was like, ‘I’ve got to go to work now.’ What do I do?”
As the actress explains, she has family history with the disease: “My father had MS. Rest in peace, my beautiful father.”
Though she told people close to her about it, Caulfield Ford hid her MS diagnosis publicly.
“I’m trying to keep my s**t together and I’ve got to go back to work,” she recalls thinking at the time. “So that was my first experience of keeping everything really quiet and showing up and just doing my job.”
Though stress can be a problem for people with MS, there are some good stresses in the actress’ life, including raising her daughter, and acting.
“I love work. I don’t like not working,” she says. “I’ve always been kind of a worker bee. I thrive in that.”
Caulfield Ford says that despite symptoms from both MS and the medication she’s on, “I worked all through it. I’ve worked through it every single time I felt tired…. I shot ‘WandaVision’ in that heat.”
She did have some difficulties during the Marvel series shoot, but kept going anyway.
“Just shut up. Just do your job,” she thought to herself. “This is the first time you’re working with Marvel. This is a big f**king deal. Do not bring attention to yourself. I have to nail the job. I have to be great. Be memorable.”
And things ended up going well enough that Caulfield Ford will be back for the “WandaVision” spin-off “Agatha: Coven of Chaos”.
“I am going back to work!” she says, adding, “Everyone has been notified that needs to be notified. I can’t put myself through what I did with ‘WandaVision’ again. I can’t do that. They did nothing wrong…. They had no idea what was going on with me. They didn’t ask anything of me that was like, ‘I need to call my agent!’ They’re asking me to just sit and chat and do my dialogue. It’s not hard.”
Caulfield Ford’s revelation comes a few years after Selma Blair also revealed her own MS diagnosis.
“I think she’s inspiring,” the actress says of Blair. “I’ve always heard nothing but great things about her. I remember she was walking out of an audition and I was walking into the same audition, years and years and years ago. I clocked her coming my way, and I was like, ‘Oh, f**k, that’s Selma Blair. I have no chance in hell. She’s getting the part.'”
