Jon Kopaloff/WireImage"We have a long time to be dead," Selma Blair says, noting that she's been repeating this mantra exhaustively. "And I spent so long trying to kill myself, or numb myself, or check out or figure out how to be alive by being half-dead. And now I just want to help other people feel better."
That epiphany came the devastatingly hard way, the 49-year-old actress finding out in August 2018 that she had multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the central nervous system, which consists of the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.
Introducing, Selma Blair, an at times gut-wrenching but also frequently funny and inspiring new documentary that opens in theaters Oct. 15 before premiering Oct. 21 on Discovery+, dips into the past darkness the Hellboy star alludes to, but mainly focuses on life since her diagnosis, particularly the summer of 2019 when she underwent a stem cell transplant that she could only hope would stop MS from ravaging her body any further.
While Blair announced in August that she's in remission and her "prognosis is great," the film, directed by Rachel Fleit, offers an up-close look at the toll MS—and the battle to fight it—took on her, showing her one minute giving Kim Kardashian a shout-out while sampling the cosmetics the reality star sent over because, as she jokes, "god knows nobody knows who she is," and then the next speaking painfully haltingly as fatigue washes over her and a cognitive fog sets in.
The 94-minute movie can be hard to watch, not least when you compare Blair's new normal to the parade of photos and footage of her looking glamorous and energetic and showing her pitch-perfect turns in contemporary classics such as Cruel Intentions and Legally Blonde. But that's also the point: Illness can be ugly, but it's the truth. And Blair is powering through and if she can...
"Disabled people like to have fun, too," she quips toward the beginning of the film as she dresses up in her Norma Desmond finest, a full-length leopard-print dress, emerald brooch and jeweled turban. As she grabs one of the elegant wooden canes she keeps on hand to help her get around, painstakingly going down the stairs one at a time, she's as ready for her closeup as she can be.
As it becomes increasingly hard for her to talk in that same sequence, she tears up. "That's what happens that I don't want people to see," she cries, before showing us just about everything.
At the same time, she adds, "I gotta laugh. Look at how I'm dressed."
Laughter through tears is basically the overall vibe of the film, a raw, unsparing look at a previously vibrant actress, model and mom fighting for not just life itself, but a certain quality of life, mixed with periodic bursts of humor courtesy of Blair's deadpan delivery and her ability—no matter how exhausted or uncomfortable or frustrated she feels—to find something to joke about. At one point she finds out the massager she ordered to combat face puffiness is more of the personal-care-down-there variety of product—apparently the second time that's happened to her. And she totes a pair of little rubber baby hands with her everywhere, including to the hospital, and you can't help cracking up just by looking at them.
But she also doesn't hold back from sharing some truly demoralizing, painful moments, making for a visceral roller coaster of progress and setbacks.
Selma Blair keeps cell phone video diaries and one from June 2018, two months before her diagnosis, showed that she was struggling to write and text. She thought the muscle spasms she'd been having—including one in her left leg that affected her stride when she walked in Christian Siriano's Fall/Winter 2018 show at New York Fashion Week that March—might have something to do with horseback riding, her favorite pastime.
In fact, she reveals, she'd felt off since the birth of her son, Arthur, in 2011.
Doctors told her "it's just sadness, you're a mom, you're overwhelmed," she recalls of the attempts she made to find out what was wrong, her symptoms dismissed as manifestations of postpartum depression.
Blair was emotionally fragile, though, after Arthur was born, and she recalls how her own mother, Molly (whom she greatly resembles), had told her that she wasn't marriage or mom material.
It turns out the actress' bittersweet relationship with her at times shockingly critical mother—who died last year during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing Blair from being able to travel to Detroit to be with her family—has shadowed her entire existence. Despite having every reason to want to distance herself (Molly's main reaction to her daughter's big break in Cruel Intentions was to ask why she had to use so much tongue in her kiss with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Blair loves her all the same. She muses that her mom—who sounds as if she suffered from depression—may not have encouraged her in order to toughen her up. As in, life isn't going to be your friend, so you better figure it out on your own.
She wonders if she understands where her mom was coming from "because my brain is hijacked sometimes, too."
Getting a diagnosis was an improvement over not knowing, she recalls, because then at least she could move forward. But then she was left with the reality of her worsening physical ailments, and it soon became apparent to her that her medications weren't helping. According to her assistant Bonny Burke, one of the confidantes we hear from in the film, it was actress Jennifer Grey who brought up stem cell transplants, telling Blair that her friend's brother had been cured of an autoimmune disorder after undergoing the procedure at Northwestern.
After considering her options, Blair decides to go for it, ignoring the insistence from an unnamed friend that she wouldn't survive the process.
Blair is seen having good days and bad, sometimes barely needing the cane as she scales a rocky slope on her Studio City, Calif., property, while at other times her mobility is visibly limited. She basks in the normalcy of being able to cut strawberries on her own in June 2019, "all very new, because I could not do this a couple months ago."
As we see her tender interactions with Arthur, who is obviously the most important part of her life, Blair reflects on blacking out while on a flight with her son (luckily he was sleeping with headphones on, she notes) and his father, her ex Jason Bleick, in 2016—an embarrassing incident that she immediately publicly apologized for, and which prompted her to never take another drink.
"It is the worst thing I've ever done as a parent and thank god nobody was hurt," she says. "Thank goodness I had the sense to be such a self-destructive fool while his father was there."
She also remembers being in pain on that trip, leading to her mixing a pill and booze, one of several instances that leave her wondering whether MS had been encroaching on her life for years before her diagnosis.
Before she goes to Chicago for the stem cell transplant—a multi-step process that only begins with preliminary chemotherapy—she lets Arthur buzz her hair off so he'd be less shocked by seeing her without it upon her return.
After the initial chemo, her treatment includes a rigorous personal evaluation in which doctors purposely mess with her head to test her resilience, giving herself injections to get ready for her cells to be harvested and then five days of intense chemo and isolation at the hospital. On the last day, Blair wanly celebrates that tomorrow will be "my new body's birthday."
She undergoes the transplant, which is followed by the engraftment period, while they wait for the cells to latch on. "My mouth tastes like dirty pennies," she observes in one scene, then gamely takes a lint-roller to her bald head in another. Nine days after the transplant, she's playing with the baby hands and trying out her best Fosse moves, cane in hand. And then after 19 days of isolation, she's discharged.
Then comes the overwhelming sense of unfairness (for us, let alone for her!) that what she just went through didn't completely cure her. Not overnight, and not even months later, when Blair admits she's "judging the process," depressed that she's still struggling with balance, her vision and almost everything else that was bothering her before.
An encounter with cancer survivor Robin Roberts at the TIME 100 Health Summit makes her feel better, the Good Morning America anchor sharing that it took two years before she really felt right after undergoing a bone marrow transplant to treat a rare blood disorder.
Setbacks abound, including finding out for the first time from a doctor in Los Angeles that her brain's gray matter—which affects muscle control, memory, speech and emotions—is damaged, something no other doctor had ever brought up, she says, throughout all those tests and scans she'd had.
But when the film catches up with Blair in the spring and summer of 2020, she's unmistakably doing better, enjoying the company of friends during an intimate birthday party in her backyard and swimming with Arthur.
Not, however, that she doesn't still have her days where she's laid low by what she can't do yet, and going out in public remains far more stressful on her body and mind than chilling at home. When she makes her long-awaited return to riding, she's upset that she only has enough energy for 10 seconds of trotting at a time.
"But the fact that you can do it for 10 seconds, like think about that," her instructor reassures her. "Think about how long it's been since you've been able to do something like that for 10 seconds, it's incredible."
Like the ability to gracefully slice a strawberry, every bit of progress is a step in the right direction.
She says at one point that she can't believe she's a disabled person who's out there helping other disabled people, but that being able to help anyone—even if it's just to make them less self-conscious about using a cane—has given her life purpose.
"I'm embarrassed to say, I'm at peace," she says in the film's final sequence as she jumps into her freshly resurfaced swimming pool wearing her mother's "magician dress," an item Molly never let her daughter try on while she was alive, making it even more fraught with meaning after she died. Blair sheds the garment underwater, leaving that piece of her past languishing at the bottom of the pool while she glides off into her future.
Introducing, Selma Blair is in theaters Oct. 15 and will be streaming on Discovery+ starting Thursday, Oct. 21.