It’s not easy for Selma Blair to go anywhere in public without getting stopped these days. This is partially, and obviously, because she is Selma Blair, beloved comic actor of the early aughts, when she perfected her famous eye roll and delivered indelible performances in Cruel Intentions and Legally Blonde. The day we meet at a Studio City café one afternoon in mid-November, she’s fresh off a triumphant return to the screen, on Dancing with the Stars (DWTS), which earned her a People’s Choice Award for Competition Contestant of 2022. But another reason is Scout, a two-year-old English Labrador retriever who has accompanied Blair almost everywhere she goes since 2021.
Scout is Blair’s service dog. Labs of his pedigree were originally bred to pull fishnets out of the ocean, but Scout, who is (rather endearingly) afraid of large bodies of water, was trained for a kinder, gentler responsibility: He alerts Blair, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in August 2018, when he senses that she’s growing faint or when she needs to take her medication.
Scout is approximately Clifford-size and somehow dashing, and as Blair waits in line to order coffee, he receives a steady stream of admirers. He is calm and attentive when it matters, but also prone to excitement, and one person wants to know if he’s still in training. No, Blair explains drily, as he greets another dog: “He’s actually my real service dog. It’s unbelievable. It’s embarrassing sometimes.”
“It feels like I’m dating the guy from the football team,” she says once we’ve found a table, Scout now at her feet. It’s brisk out, and she’s dressed in an oversized Dôen fisherman’s sweater and white jeans, her hair pixied and dyed blonde. She fixes me with a signature deadpan stare: “Like I finally have a cute boyfriend.”
They’ve formed a charming, therapeutic bond, one that represents just a small piece of Blair’s MS journey. Her diagnosis proved to be a catalyzing moment in her life. MS is an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system, in which a person’s immune system mistakenly attacks myelin, a protective sheath that acts as insulation around the body’s nerve fibers. For Blair, the symptoms of the neurological condition have been wide-ranging and long-standing. In her 2022 memoir, Mean Baby, she describes experiencing physical issues she now associates with MS and its complications—like throbbing headaches, consistent fevers, and limbs that “felt out of control”—as early as the fourth grade; later on, she developed persistent pain and eventually started to lose feeling in her legs.
Over the years, doctors had wondered if she possibly was depressed, malnourished, or even making it all up, so when she finally learned the reason for her ailments, it snapped things into focus for her. “I was overwhelmed by a sense of relief,” she writes, recalling the moment she found out about her MS, “like the way you feel when an ocean wave breaks right at the shore before taking you under.”
Since her diagnosis, Blair has opened up about her health so frequently and freely that she’s rapidly become one of the most prominent faces of disability advocacy in Hollywood. The 2021 documentary Introducing, Selma Blair chronicled her life in the months following her diagnosis, as she prepared for a risky yet potentially life-altering stem cell transplant in the summer of 2019—a process Blair refers to as “rebooting the computer.” She is now in remission, meaning the disease is not progressing. While she still grapples with certain MS complications, Blair says she has “stopped losing abilities.” In September, she competed on DWTS for five weeks, joining a growing number of people with known disabilities to appear on the show.
Blair has always fancied herself a supporting player in Hollywood. “I’m definitely more of an independent actress, or the strange oddball,” she says. “I’m not really a public-pleasure person.” But at 50, and in the wake of a life-changing diagnosis, Blair has turned outward, becoming a proactive figure advocating for inclusion and accessibility in an industry that rarely prioritizes these things.
“I understand why people with MS spend a lot of time in their homes,” Blair writes in her memoir. “Self-preservation. These small things add up. In my bedroom, on the floor that I’m used to, I can dance.”
“I always say how visibility matters for the disabled,” she says. “Well, visibility matters for everyone. You have to show that you’re still alive.”
By Hollywood standards, Blair was a late bloomer. Her breakout role didn’t arrive until 1999’s Cruel Intentions, when she and Sarah Michelle Gellar sparked a generation’s sexual awakening with a famously salivary kiss. In Legally Blonde and The Sweetest Thing, she was similarly cast as the dark-haired supporting foil to uniformly blonde leading ladies. She was featured on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood 2000 cover, but appeared behind the fold. That kind of industry shoehorning might have made another person cynical about the business, but 20-plus years into her career, Blair remains unabashedly and earnestly enamored of it. “I never had that competitive drive that would make me uncomfortable if I didn’t get a role,” she says. “I always rooted for whoever got it.”
This is not to say she’s had an easy ride. Blair grew up in a Detroit suburb, the youngest of four girls, and attended Cranbrook Kingswood, an elite private school. (In Mean Baby, she spoke publicly for the first time about having been groomed and sexually assaulted by an influential dean there.) Her magistrate mother, who died in 2020, was glamorous, icy, and the center of Blair’s world; her father, a lawyer, left the family when Blair was a teenager. By middle school, she had grown accustomed both to living with unexplained headaches and facial pain and to using alcohol to feel better, at least temporarily. She recalls getting drunk for the first time at age seven, when she downed so much Manischewitz at a family Passover gathering she blacked out. Drinking, Blair says, “was always self-medication. It helped. It took away pain like no other, until the next day.”
She has not had a drink since June 2016, after a trip to Cancún with her now 11-year-old son, Arthur, and his father, the designer Jason Bleick, ended with a mid-flight outburst and her getting taken off a plane on a stretcher. (She now attends a regular private Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.) Sobriety was one significant piece of the puzzle in Blair’s hard-fought journey to stability—followed, of course, by her eventual MS diagnosis and the soul-bearing personal projects that followed.
“Her resiliency and resolve is awesome,” the actor Claire Danes, one of Blair’s closest friends since the early aughts, tells SELF. “But—and I can say this because she’s so open about it—she was really sad for a long time. And when she went through this crucible, she burned through a lot of that. Emotionally and spiritually, she’s a lot lighter now.”
In August, Blair ran into her neighbor, Sasha Farber, a 38-year-old dancer who has served as a professional on DWTS since 2011. The timing felt like kismet. She was finally in remission, and feeling physically better for the first time in years, but, after a terrible breakup, she had been having a hard time getting up and out of the house. She could see how it was starting to affect Arthur. “He would tell his friends, ‘Oh, you can come over to my house. My mom’s not going to want to drive me because she’s weak,’” Blair remembers. “And I thought, Oh, my god; this is exactly why I wanted to get better, so I wouldn’t be like this anymore.”
When she was driving Arthur to school one day, Farber pulled up alongside her at a red light. They were both headed to the same coffee shop. Farber’s partner for the upcoming season had just dropped out, leaving him in a pinch, and when he saw Blair that day, something clicked. At the café, he asked her to consider joining him on the show, but Blair laughed him off.
They parted ways, but Farber couldn’t shake the idea. “I love to teach, and I love to see my partners grow,” he tells SELF. His friend Nastia Liukin, the Olympic gymnast and a former DWTS competitor, encouraged him to write Blair a heartfelt note, so he did, and then dropped it off at Blair’s house. Blair was inspired by the overture, and agreed to try rehearsing with Farber briefly to see how it would feel. She was surprised to find that, accompanied by an experienced and reliable dance partner, she really enjoyed herself.
She called up her team, including her longtime manager and close friend, Troy Nankin, to get them on board with the idea. “I think I actually need this,” she remembers telling them. “I think it’s important for people with chronic illness or disabilities to see what they can do. I deserve to have a good time and try.”
The physical intensity of DWTS makes leaping into the show an audacious move for many new cast members—Blair says she typically rehearsed for four hours a day in the week leading up to broadcast—but it also represented a more mainstream shift to Blair. After so many years as one of Hollywood’s unconventional, supporting characters, she was still worried that she wouldn’t look the part. “I don’t do well on TV, historically,” Blair says. “I don’t really have that commercial face with the bleached teeth and the Botox and the whole thing that’s very camera-friendly.”
DWTS was, in her words, “the biggest commercial thing I’ve done.” Its aesthetic is prime-time schmaltz and sequins, at odds with the easy and understated Hollywood glamour Blair has always projected. “In the past I’d be like, ‘No, I don’t want to admit to people my career’s ‘over’ and go on Dancing,’” she says. Now, “I realize what a vehicle it is.” These days, she says, it’s the main thing people recognize her from.
Blair was convinced she would only last one episode before being voted off and was surprised to find that Farber’s instinct had been right: She both loved the experience and desperately wanted to win it all. “I felt like I was in college again and you love the class,” she says. “You know, like, I never knew I loved printmaking! It immediately transformed my way of thinking, and it immediately put a pep in my step.”
She felt the physical benefits almost instantaneously and adjusted her diet to support the intense training schedule. Whereas in the past she might have only eaten, in her words, “some Cheetos and a charcuterie platter once my son went to bed,” Blair found that, on DWTS, she “just wanted fuel.” She hired a friend to cook nutritious meals for her and Arthur while the show was filming. “It changed my relationship to food and exercise,” she says. “I had energy and I slept well.”
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In her first appearance—which aired on September 19, barely a month after she agreed to join the show—she and Farber danced a Viennese waltz. Blair wore a shimmering purple dress and let Farber spin her in circles, hovering inches over the floor. “Specific steps didn’t work, so you had to dig deeper to find something that works for her,” Farber says. He gave her days off of training when she needed to rest and made sure he had one hand supporting her at all times when they were dancing—a gesture that Blair appreciated. “She is an incredible, incredible student,” Farber adds.
She and Farber performed together four more times, logging solid scores and staying atop the competition. (Blair even performed a rumba while blindfolded, after realizing in rehearsals that dancing with her eyes closed kept her heart rate down, and therefore kept her MS symptoms from flaring up.) During her last few weeks on the show, Blair’s knee had started giving out. She is used to dealing with numbness in her left leg, which can be disorienting—exponentially more so when trying to find footing in a fast-paced ballroom dance—but this felt different. She couldn’t even stand on it. She thought maybe she’d injured her patella doing splits, so she and Farber went to see her doctor, who ordered an MRI. They found stress fractures and bleeding in her knee, as well as a ligament tear in her ankle and damage in her hips, which her doctors attributed to her rigorous training intersecting with MS complications. Blair considered powering through the pain, but ultimately decided it would be better to bow out on her own terms. “I was so brokenhearted to have been injured,” Blair says. “I really wanted to keep going. I was really proud of myself that, for at least five weeks, I kept up. But there was a time that I had to take care of myself.”
In November, after weeks of mandated rest, Blair returned to DWTS for a surprise performance with Farber. She danced barefoot, and did an aerial cartwheel, lifted high by her partner.
“I would’ve felt more capable if I could have kept up with the Joneses,” she says of her decision to walk away. “That’s just the fact of it. But considering what I had just been through, I took time to be proud. It did give me permission to…” she trails off, reconsidering. “Maybe permission isn’t the right word. It did give me some inner knowledge that I’m stronger than I thought.”
In August 2018, while vacationing in Miami, Blair jumped from a friend’s boat into the water and “really truly knew,” in that moment, that something was not right with her body. She posted on Instagram about her longtime struggle with chronic pain, and the actor Elizabeth Berkley suggested she see her brother, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai. Right after the trip, an MRI revealed that Blair had multiple MS-related lesions on her brain. She shared her diagnosis publicly that October: “I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy,” she wrote on Instagram. “And my left side is asking for directions from a broken GPS.” Blair found the identification of her illness to be a totally clarifying moment. “I felt so horrible my whole life,” she says. “Even as a seven-year-old, I researched why I was so tired.” Years later, she finally had answers, which revitalized her: “I figured it out now. I’m among the living.”
“She had been suffering for a long time and wasn’t able to identify the problem,” Danes says. “There was some relief and release when she finally understood what was happening. The sense of tragedy was really mitigated by that.”
In Introducing, Blair appears, repeatedly and without veneer, at her most vulnerable: struggling to go down the stairs in her home or get out words during an interview, letting her son shave her head before chemo. “This is what happens that I don’t want people to see,” she says, head in her hands, when she briefly loses the ability to speak during an interview with director Rachel Fleit. The film is buoyed by Blair’s singularly dark sense of humor; in one scene, she picks up a toy phone receiver in her home and pretends to field a call from her late friend, Carrie Fisher: “I’m so sorry I can’t talk right now,” Blair says. “We’re shooting the final days of my life.”
Though she had tried several treatments over the years, Blair’s flare-ups continued to worsen. Her sister Katie brought up the idea of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), an intense procedure that aims to rebuild a person’s immune system; it involves chemotherapy and, frequently, up to several weeks of isolation. It also required her to be in Chicago, away from Arthur. As the procedure is considered high-risk, Blair was told she should “make plans” in case things did not go well.
But Blair was desperate for relief, which she felt would help her be a more active, present mother to her young son. She decided it was worth the try, and the HSCT ultimately led to her current remission. She still experiences occasional MS symptoms, including mild dystonia—involuntary muscle contractions that can slur her speech and set off leg spasms that sometimes affect her mobility. She uses a cane to get around and, when she has been sitting for a while, her left leg can go numb, which makes it difficult to walk at first. “I’m so much better, but it haunts my physical cells. It’s there,” Blair says. “Some people wake up two years later and they’re like, ‘I’m healed! Colors are brighter!’ But I never had that moment. I just stopped having regression.”
Today, after having faced her own mortality, Blair feels like a different version of herself. The diagnosis, she says, “really did rewire me. It rewired me to find acceptance in being honest about my faults, about my past addiction, and about my problems. It made me more empathetic towards myself.”
When we were waiting to order coffee, a couple of women struck up conversation, asking Blair about Scout’s training. “I get really triggered and he helps me,” Blair started to say. Her speech slowed, and one of the women laughed reflexively, not understanding the cause. Blair did not pause to address her misjudgment. “Me going through my day with my halting speech at times and then it going back to normal—that’s visibility for people,” she says later. “I don’t have shame in that at all. I know some people find it curious, but we all have something.”
In September, a week before she first appeared on DWTS, Blair presented the award for best drama series at the Emmys. Using her cane, she walked onstage in a black-and-gold Alexander McQueen gown, and was met by her peers with a standing ovation. “I am so, so honored,” she said, clearly a bit verklempt, before hooking the cane over her arm to open the envelope and present the award to Succession. It was a brief moment in another sprawling Hollywood awards show—but it was also one with real influence that will be almost imperceptibly gradual and that isn’t as deeply felt by most able-bodied viewers.
Keah Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy and has grown close to Blair since profiling her for Town & Country in 2021, says her visibly disabled presence in spaces like mainstream award shows over the past few years has already made a difference. “It’s so cool to see somebody be so visible and unapologetic in spaces where disabled people are not often welcome or given the opportunity to be,” Brown tells SELF. “To have a complete movie star not only embrace her disability, but be vocal about it and be proud of it—it’s really moved mountains, especially in Hollywood.”
Since sharing her diagnosis, Blair has grown more comfortable in her role as an advocate for accessibility. In June, she was appointed chief creative officer of Guide Beauty, a cosmetics line that makes products for people with varying levels of physical ability, and she works with the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America and the American Association of People with Disabilities. She has also developed friendships with people like Crip Camp director James Lebrecht and Andraéa Lavant, a disability inclusion specialist who consults with brands and on movie sets. Blair and Brown talk regularly, sharing pop culture news over text and trading advice about pain management. “Our friendship feels not like it’s built on disability, but like it’s just an aspect of it,” Brown says. “That’s something that I absolutely appreciate.”
These relationships, Blair says, “have taught me the most about confidence and taking care of myself. They’ve been the people that have been rolling the roll and walking the walk since they were young. They’ve guided me about knowing what I need, about being disciplined with myself, about taking the time to rest. These are people that have been trying to keep up in a non-disabled world for a long time. They have a lot of practice.”
Blair is making time for other work—she would like to write another book one day and says that her time on DWTS has made her seriously consider returning to acting for the first time in years. Of course, signing on for film and television work is a different kind of consideration than it was earlier in Blair’s career. “It takes a lot of energy,” she says. “I want to say, ‘Oh, it’s easy to hire me. I’m not a problem! But here’s my rider of things I’ll need, and they’re not just green M&Ms.’ It’s like, how do we make sure there’s a railing on everything? If there’s a railing, I can find a way to lift that leg correctly. But without it, I’m just lost, balance-wise.”
One thing Lavant taught her is that there’s no metric that says only certain people with disabilities can ask for what they need. “Yes, there’s a spectrum of peoples’ abilities,” Blair says. “Absolutely. But you are what you are and it requires accommodations.” She has learned she would rather speak up about these requirements—railings in a trailer, more frequent bathroom breaks, or whatever else they may be for a specific project—than keep quiet and have to stay home for lack of them. “There’s just so much realizing that people feel that they are a burden, and it takes away from your work,” Blair says. “It takes away from focusing on your right to be there just as much as everyone else on the set. Let’s get used to this. Let’s build this into our base camps.”
After spending so much of her life with an undiagnosed illness, Blair’s newfound clarity and understanding have opened up space in her life for her to explore more joy. She rides her horse, Nibbles, with some regularity, and she and Farber plan to continue dancing together. She relishes being out and active in the world again, trying new food and taking Arthur on adventures. Sometimes, she’ll refill a row of strangers’ parking meters just because. “I think I inflict myself on people a bit,” she says with a laugh. “I realize not everyone’s idea of joy is talking to the woman with the service dog in line somewhere.” But pushing for accessibility, Blair says, is “where my heart is right now.”
“I don’t find the advocacy trying,” she continues. “I know it’s for other people more than myself, and it makes me feel better. It really does.”
“I find that her visibility has opened up doors for me,” Brown says. “When I mention her, people light up. From word of mouth alone, she’s really doing that work of people just seeing her and being like, If she can do it, I can do it. It’s changing the way people see themselves and each other.”
For her part, Blair has started to recognize how her mere presence might also make a difference in the industry. When she started using a cane to get around, she noticed that there were never any visible ramps to get up to the stage at most of the big award shows—like the Emmys, for example. “It’s not just so the person in the room can get up there,” Blair says. “It’s so the viewer at home normalizes that the kid in the wheelchair or the braces or with cerebral palsy—whatever it is that makes them feel different than the person that can just bounce up with their heels—can be in the movies. It’s like, I can dream this. It’s built in that I can dream this. There is a way for me to get up there.”
Photography: Heather Hazzan. Creative direction: Amber Venerable. Wardrobe styling: Sean Knight. Hair: Bridget Brager at The Wall Group. Makeup: Kara Bua at A-Frame Agency. Manicure: Ashlie Johnson at The Wall Group. Profile editor: Alisa Hrustic. Sensitivity editor: Mark Hay
