Blair puts herself out there
Actor shows herself living with multiple sclerosis in unflinching documentary she hopes can help others
Selma Blair could only talk for a half-hour. That was as long as she trusted her brain and her body to cooperate — any longer and she feared that her focus might start to wander or her speech might begin to trail.
“We’re being responsible in knowing that smaller moments will be clearer moments,” she said.
For Blair, no day is free from the effects of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease that she learned she had in 2018 but that she believes began attacking her central nervous system many years earlier.
An unparalleled lack of inhibition has always defined Blair’s best-known work. She is 49, with a resume that includes seminal works of teensploitation (“Cruel Intentions”), comedy (“Legally Blonde”) and comic-book adventure (“Hellboy”).
That same unbridled bluntness persists in all her interactions, whether scripted or spontaneous, with cameras on or off, even when she is sharing her account of the time she went on “The Tonight Show” wearing a strappy top she accidentally put on sideways.
But Blair’s candor has come to mean something more in the three years since she went public about her MS diagnosis. Now, whether she is posting personal diaries on social media or appearing on a red carpet, she understands she is a representative with an opportunity to educate a wider audience about what she and others with MS are experiencing.
It is a philosophy of maximum openness that she is taking further by appearing as the subject of a new documentary, “Introducing, Selma Blair.” The film, directed by Rachel Fleit, is an unflinching account of Blair’s life with MS and the stem-cell transplant she underwent to treat it in 2019.
The documentary is in theaters and streaming on Discovery+.
As Blair explained, she was hopeful that the film would be meaningful to viewers who feel challenged and uncertain, whether or not they have a chronic illness.
“This is my human condition,” she said, “and everyone has their own, but I think we are united in feeling alone or frightened when we have a big change in our lives. This wasn’t a vanity project at all, and I’m very capable of loving vanity.”
For Blair, the documentary is just one piece of a larger effort to understand herself — to determine how much of her identity has been shaped by her disease, and what will remain or change now that she is being treated for it.
“If this had happened in my
20s, when I’m trying to start a career and set a few shekels aside, I would have been mortified,” she said. “I’m old enough now. I’m getting to know a whole different personality, and I’m not ashamed.”
Thinking back to her upbringing in suburban Michigan, Blair described herself as a 7-year-old who toted around her own copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference, the massive tome of information on prescription drugs, and wondered why she experienced constant pain, fatigue and unpredictable mood swings.
These difficulties persisted into adulthood: The pain got worse, particularly after the birth of her son, Arthur, in 2011; she had problems with her vision and
experienced involuntary muscle contractions in her neck.
Until she received her diagnosis, Blair said, she couldn’t understand why her symptoms varied from setting to setting. “I can walk better in my house, but outside it’s like a sand pit,” she said. “With certain light, my speech becomes intermittent even though my larynx is fine.”
“It never occurred to me that there’s a traffic jam that happens in my brain,” she said.
In the flurry of attention that followed Blair’s disclosure of her diagnosis, she was introduced to Fleit, and they agreed to start shooting the documentary in the days just before Blair traveled to Chicago for her stem-cell transplant.
Fleit said Blair exercised no
editorial control over the film, adding that the endeavor would succeed only if the actor “was willing to show the world what really happened — that brutal intimacy and honesty that you just don’t see — and she was totally open to that.”
Fleit, who has alopecia universalis, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss, said she felt a particular connection to Blair as filming proceeded.
“Being a bald lady in the world has given me unique access to a certain kind of emotional pain,” Fleit said. “It does not frighten me anymore, and I feel uniquely qualified to hold the space for another person who’s experiencing that.”
To Parker Posey, a friend and colleague of Blair’s for nearly 20 years, the decision to make a documentary was as much a legitimate form of expression as any other artistic enterprise.
“This is the only thing we have — your life as an actor, it’s all material, it’s all story,” Posey said. “Am I going to land in something that gives me meaning, away from the pettiness of most entertainment?”
Posey added, “Anyone who can find purpose in creating what they’re supposed to create and bravely live their life, that’s art. That’s the triumph.”
Blair, for her part, said that once shooting started on the documentary, “I don’t think I noticed. There was really no directing, and I mean that in the best way.”
She added, “I don’t think I’ve realized that a film is coming out where I’m the subject of it. I haven’t really processed that.”
In a follow-up conversation, she felt she’d used her admittedly outrageous sense of humor to paper over her anxiety in the first conversation. “I get so spooked because there is still, even in my mind, a stigma of, you won’t bring it — you won’t be able to make this mind-body thing work,” she said. “I’ll use the defense of a shtick when I feel like I’m faltering.”
She was also bothered by a remark she had seen on her Instagram account from someone who offered support for her documentary but said, as Blair described the comment, “I wish a regular person were doing it, like a person that’s not a celebrity, because it’s not the same.”
Blair emphatically added, “I am a regular person.”